Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
-
I have multiple URLs that SEOMoz is reporting as duplicate content. The reason is that there are characters in the URL that may, or may not, be capitalized depending on user input.
A couple examples are:
www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-sale
www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-sale
www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-rent
www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-rent
There are currently thousands of instances of this on the site.
Is this something I should spend effort to try and resolve (may not be minor effort), or should I just ignore it and move on?
-
Hey Jom, you only rewrite the URL if it is not all lowercase, you can distinguish between lower and upper-case in your rewrites.
-
Mark,
In the canonicalization guide link you sent me, there is a link to Matt Cutts' blog www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ where he talks about it. In that blog he posts:
Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?
A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with upper case to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).This makes me think that doing a 301 redirect and a rel="canonical" for lower case is not needed.
I'm conflicted again.
-
When you rewrite a URL that is already lower case to lower case with a 301 response code, does it now return a 301? Does that mean all pages on the site now return 301? Wouldn't that be bad?
Sorry if I'm being dense. I understand enough about rewrite rules to be dangerous (sometimes, very dangerous).
Jom
-
Yeah, it is absolutely the right thing to do. You can force the URLs t be lower case in RoR as well if you don't want to do it in htaccess (i would do both).
You are simply saying:
-
there are multiple versions of this page on different urls
-
this is the main version of the page
301 them to lower case and canonicalise them and you are good to go!
Marcus
-
-
Thanks, much! I will read through these.
-
Hi Marcus and Mark,
Thanks for the response. On creating the rel="canonical" statements.
That means that I will have thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (there are a lot of cities and zips in the US) of rel="canonical" statements on my site.
I thought I read on one of the blogs that too many canonical statements are bad practice. The site is dynamic (Ruby on Rails), I can certainly make the change. I would just like to be sure it's the wise thing to do.
-
Hey Jom,
I must admit I am not sure on the level of urgency to sort this problem out but personally I like to keep the duplication of content to a minimum.
There are multiple ways to sort this out but the most straight forward would probably be to add a rel canonical tag to your web pages.
Here is a good post discussing the faceted issues you can get from e-commerce site, here is SEOMoz's canonicalization guide and here is another seomoz blog post about e-commerce sites and the use of the rel canonical tag.
Hope this helps
-
Hey Jom
Problem is, from a search engine perspective, those are four duplicate pages & from a linking perspective, they are four different pages that you could see your link popularity shared between. Neither of which is ideal.
I would certainly deal with this but it needn't be an arduous task.
1. Set up a rewrite rule to change all URLs to lowercase and 301 any non lowercase ones, something like this in your htaccess should do the job assuming you are using a LAMP environment.
RewriteEngine On RewriteMap lc int:tolower RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z] RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]
2. Add an automated lowercase canonical to all of these pages so they canonicalise to the lowercase version.
3. Try to replace the links so they all use lowercase. If this is a dynamic site it should be easy but if not, you could still do a string replacement across multiple files. You could write a little script to automate this if it is a huge job from the sitemap (of lowercase URLs of course.
Certainly worth doing and should not be too difficult with a bit of smarts applied.
Hope this helps!
Marcus
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Content
HI There, Hoping someone can help me - before i damage my desk banging my head. Getting notifications from ahrefs and Moz for duplicate content. I have no idea where these weird urls have came from , but they do take us to the correct page (but it seems a duplicate of this page). correct url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Antique-Vintage-Rings-c152.htm Incorrect url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm This is showing for most of our store categories 😞 Desperate for help as to what could be causing these issues. I have a technical member of the ecommerce software go through the large sitemap files and they assured me it wasn't linked to the sitemap files. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Responsive Code Creating Duplicate Content Issue
Good morning, Our developers have recently created a new site for our agency. The site is responsive for mobile/tablets. I've just put the site through Screaming Frog and I've been informed of duplicate H2s. When I've looked at some of the page sources, there are some instances of duplicated H2s and duplicated content. These duplicates don't actually appear on the site, only in the code. When I asked the development guys about this, they advised this is duplicated because of the code for the responsive site. Will the site be negatively affected because of this? Not everything is duplicated, which leads me to believe it probably could have been designed better... but I'm no developer so don't know for sure. I've checked the code for other responsive sites and no duplicates can be found. Thanks in advance, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Hreflang and possible duplicate content SEO issue
| 0 <a class="vote-down-off" title="This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful">down vote</a> favorite | Hey community, my first question here 🙂 Imagine there is a page with video, it has hreflang tags setup, to lead let's say German visitors to /de/ folder... So, on that German version of page, everything like menus, navigation and such are in German, but the video is the same, the title of the video (H1 tag) is the same, <title></code></strong> and <strong><code>meta description</code></strong> is the same as on the original English page. It means that general (English) page and German version of it has the same key content in English.</p> <p>To me it seems to be a SEO duplicate content issue. As I know, Google doesn't think that content is duplicate, if it is properly translated to other language.</p> <p>Does my explained case mean that the content will be detected by Google as duplicate?</p> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Technical SEO | | poiseo0 -
Mod Rewrite question to prevent duplicate content
Hi, I'm having problems with a mod rewrite issue and duplicate content On my website I have Website.com Website.com/directory Website.com/directory/Sub_directory_more_stuff_here Both #1 and #2 are the same page (I can't change this). #3 is different pages. How can I use mod rewrite to to make #2 redirect to #1 so I don't have duplicate content WHILE #3 still works?
Technical SEO | | kat20 -
Is there ever legitimate near duplicate content?
Hey guys, I’ve been reading the blogs and really appreciate all the great feedback. It’s nice to see how supportive this community is to each other. I’ve got a question about near duplicate content. I’ve read a bunch of great post regarding what is duplicate content and how to fix it. However, I’m looking at a scenario that is a little different from what I’ve read about. I’m not sure if we’d get penalized by Google or not. We are working with a group of small insurance agencies that have combined some of their back office work, and work together to sell the same products, but for the most part act as what they are, independent agencies. So we now have 25 different little companies, in 25 different cities spread across the southeast, all selling the same thing. Each agency has their own URL, each has their own Google local places registration, their own backlinks to their local chambers, own contact us and staff pages, etc. However, we have created landing pages for each product line, with the hopes of attracting local searches. While we vary each landing page a little per agency (the auto insurance page in CA talks about driving down the 101, while the auto insurance page in Georgia says welcome to the peach state) probably 75% of the land page content is the same from agency to agency. There is only so much you can say about specific lines of insurance. They have slightly different titles, slightly different headers, but the bulk of the page is the same. So here is the question, will Google hit us with a penalty for having similar content across the 25 sites? If so, how do you handle this? We are trying to write create content, and unique content, but at the end of the day auto insurance in one city is pretty much the same as in another city. Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | mavrick0 -
Duplicate content across multiple domains
I have come across a situation where we have discovered duplicate content between multiple domains. We have access to each domain and have recently within the past 2 weeks added a 301 redirect to redirect each page dynamically to the proper page on the desired domain. My question relates to the removal of these pages. There are thousands of these duplicate pages. I have gone back and looked at a number of these cached pages in google and have found that the cached pages that are roughly 30 days old or older. Will these pages ever get removed from google's index? Will the 301 redirect even be read by google to be redirected to the proper domain and page? If so when will that happen? Are we better off submitting a full site removal request of the sites that carries the duplicate content at this point? These smaller sites do bring traffic on their own but I'd rather not wait 3 months for the content to be removed since my assumption is that this content is competing with the main site. I suppose another option would be to include no cache meta tag for these pages. Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmsobe0 -
URL Duplicate Content Issues (Website Transition)
Hey guys, I just transitioned my website and I have a question. I have built up all the link juice around my old url styles. To give you some clarity: My old CMS rendered links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands My new CMS renders links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands/ My new CMS's auto-sitemap also generates them with the slash on the end. Also throughout the website the CMS links to them with the slash at the end and i link to them without the slash (because it's what i am used to). I have the canonical without the slash. Should I just 301 to the version with the slash before google crawls again? I'm worried that i'll lose all the trust and ranking i built up to the one without the slash. I rank very high for certain keywords and some pages house a large portion of our traffic. What a mess! Help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0 -
Duplicate content connundrum
Hey Mozzers- I have a tricky situation with one of my clients. They're a reputable organization and have been mentioned in several major news articles. They want to create a Press page on their site with links to each article, but they want viewers to remain within the site and not be redirected to the press sites themselves. The other issue is some of the articles have been removed from the original press sites where they were first posted. I want to avoid duplicate content issues, but I don't see how to repost the articles within the client's site. I figure I have 3 options: 1. create PDFs (w/SEO-friendly URLs) with the articles embedded in them that open in a new window. 2. Post an image with screenshot of article on a unique URL w/brief content. 3. Copy and paste the article to a unique URL. If anyone has experience with this issue or any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Jaime Brown
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0