Can anyone explain why and how these odd URLs could be working?

[danatanseo]

In our GWT and Google Analytics traffic reports, I often see some very oddly formed URLs. Here's an example

http://www.ccisolutions.com/storefront/www.ccisolutions.com

and here's another
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat

What strikes me about this particular URL is two things:

1. It renders this page http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/on-disc-printing, but not with that URL, the URL stays http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat
2. When I break this URL into pieces

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CEW.cat
and www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat,
both redirect to: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/on-disc-printing

This makes me wonder, is there something (a rule?) in the
backend (maybe the .htaccess file?)that was set up that says

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CEW.cat
= www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat
 (or maybe vice versa?), and as a result an odd URL for the page is being
written automatically?

This scenario worked on every category page I checked. All had the same results. For example, I tried:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/AAA.cat
and it rendered the Live Sound category page, but without redirecting to the
user friendly URL. This URL stayed unchanged in the address bar

When I broke it into pieces, like

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/AAA.cat
and www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/AAA.cat, both of these redirected to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/sound-video-lighting-equipment-experts

Have any of you ever encountered a problem like this? Any sugeestions as to what might be causing it and how to remedy the problem? It is definitely causing us a duplicate content headache. Thanks!

Dana

[danatanseo]

Thanks George! Fantastic detail and I think between your suggestions and Ben's too we are going to get further to solving this than we've ever gotten before. Perhaps we'll even solve this. That would be so great. As I mentioned, the company identified this problem 4 years before they hired me, and it's never been solved. I feel like part of why I am there as there SEO strategist is to pound away at these problems until they're fixed.

Thanks so much to you both. I can't wait to go in on Monday morning and use these suggestions to solve a five year old problem! Awesome.

I'll let you know what happens. If we fix it, I owe you and Ben dinner! (at the very least)

[danatanseo]

Thanks Ben. No apology necessary, it's all good. Your suggestion in combination with George's could lead us to an answer. This is definitely going to get us closer to finding the problem than we've ever gotten before. The company has been aware of this problem for almost 5 years but hasn't ever identified how to fix it. I've only been there a year now and I'm on the warpath to fix these technical issues. There are so many of them causing duplicate content problems that any SEO I do is undermined by problems like these.

I really really appreciate your reply and suggestions!

Dana

[GeorgeAndrews]

I'm not sure what CMS you are using, but I've seen this before with Joomla when setting the SEO Settings in the Global Configuration section of the Administration panel. Specifically, when working with the Apache mod_rewrite setting; which is related to the .htaccess question you had.

There are a number of things wrong with the way some CMS's have set up their redirects and how they present content. You may end up playing with each combination to fix your issue (depending on how you want to fix it).

If I were looking into this, I would do the following:

1. I would determine if I was using Joomla. If so, check your configuration.php file and see if you have your domain name provided in the property for "live_site". If you do, try changing this from 'www.ccisolutions.com' (or whatever is there) to the empty string '' (aka just two single quotes).
2. If you are not using Joomla, see if there is a configuration file for the CMS you are using and look for something similar to the above.
3. If there is not a configuration setting that is providing for this "duplication" of domain name, look at the .htaccess file itself to see why it redirects when you break the URL up, but not when it has a second domain string in the URL (e.g. the second "www.ccisolutions.com").
4. Then look at the code for the CMS and see how it interprets your URLs. To me it looks like you are using some sort of MVC framework which is taking each piece of the URL and translating it into variables to determine what content to show (REST-like). When it is parsing the URL, it seems to be looking for the end of the domain name and then taking anything off the end to translate into content.

However you figure out the issue, I suggest looking at how your CMS is actually producing the canonical tag. Right now this URL (http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat) is using the following canonical:

rel="canonical" href="on-disc-printing"/>

I don't think that is what you are looking for in your canonical tags.

I hope this helps and answers your questions.

[BenFox]

Hi Dana,

I wrote the following after assuming , for no reason at all, that you didn't know much about SEO. However having looked at your profile I realized that I was wrong and that my tone is probably a little patronizing. That being said it's 1am over here and I really don't want to rewrite it so please accept my apologies.

---

If I had to guess (and it is a guess as I'm not technical) I would say it was some badly formed links.

You know how some of your error pages have an Origin parameter (like this one) that say where the page was generated? Well these URLs follow the same format as the error pages that you're finding. It looks like rather than using an absolute link (like http://www.ccisolutions.com/page) the onclick action is actually generating a relative link (so just /page).

When you use a relative link your site adds the partial URL (/page) onto the end of your domain to give you a full URL (http://www.ccisolutions.com + /page = http://www.ccisolutions.com/page). It looks like you're using relative links as if they were static ones. Which is why you have "www.ccisolutions" in each URL twice.

If I had to blame anything it would be whatever is powering your IAFDispatcher however as I haven't been able to replicate your problem I couldn't be certain. If you can track how these URLs were generated by looking at the preceding pages that are sending traffic/bots to them then you should be able to narrow it down to which links are broken.