Url rewrites / shortcuts - Are they considered duplicate content?
-
When creating a url rewrite or shortcut, does this
- create duplicate content issues?
- split your rankings / authority with google/search engines?
Scenario 1
wwwlwhatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/dqotd/
->
www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/08/12/2012/deep-questions-of-the-day.html
Scenario 2
->
www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/08/12/2012/deep-questions-of-the-day.html
(or to make it more compicated...directs to the above mentioned scenario 1 url rewrite)
www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/dqotd/
*note well- there's no server side access so mentions of optimizing .htacess are useless in this situation.
To be clear, I'm only referring to rewrites, not redirects...just trying to understand the implications of rewrites.
Thanks!
-
Regarding bit.ly, from their FAQ:
_bitly works by issuing a "301 redirect": a technique for making a webpage available under many URLs. When you shorten a link with bitly, you are redirecting a click from bitly to the destination URL. A 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine-friendly method for webpage redirection, and is what bitly uses. Because bitly doesn’t re-use or modify links, we consider our redirects to be permanent._So you're fine there. Re your own short links, you'll have to check whether they are redirecting or using cannonical tags.
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 or an update ???
Buying Guide and Product Category page competing for the same keyword ? Got a “nuts and bold website” selling basic stuff. Imagine selling simple nuts, bolts and washers (the little ring that goes in between) in different metals. Imagine a website with a very wide and deep line of these simple products. For long tail keywords we rank well (Example: 0.25 inch bolts). For the keyword: “Nuts bolts” our main category page use to rank well low 1<sup>st</sup> page to second page up against the big guys (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, some drug store who may have a mix pack of nuts and bolts, but still Google don’t see the difference and list 2 pages each for these guys). But then in mid-February there were an update and suddenly our “Buying guide for nuts and bolts” rank higher and started to compete with our own product category page. That was never our intention. These two pages now compete for the ranking on page 4<sup>th</sup>. Clearly there were more words on the buying guide page but no changes had been made to it for well months or years. To make up for it some more words were added to the category page, but of cause there is only so many way you can fraise words about “nuts and bolts” without sounding a bit duplicate/re-writing. So what do I do now ?? Clearly the product category page is the one we like to rank highest with the guide a close 2nd. Most customer don’t need the buying guide but it is good to have and great support as we got lot of good comments from customer who read it. Made a link to the buying guide from the category page and wise verses. The category page got an embedded video. Moz list the page authority for the category page to 16 and 1 for the buying guide but clearly G see it differently. Already tried to change the Meta Tag Title and Description a little but it is hard to do if the word “Nuts Bolts” is to appear in the description or people don’t know what to expect. Could just insert a “do not index” for the buying guide but not a good long term solution. Unfortunately I am out of imagination at this point. Any good suggestions ?? Thanks, Kim Any good suggestions ???
Technical SEO | | KimX0 -
Duplicate blog URLs in Magenton
On one my sites Moz is picking up 4483 duplicate content pages. The majority of these are from our blog and video sections on our site. We're using a URL shortener and it appears that some of the pages are the full version of the URL then the shortened version. However if you go to the full version you get redirected to the shorter one. So I would assume that the Moz crawler should get the same redirect? We're also getting pagination being shown as duplicate pages, which I would half expect, but the URLs Magento is creating are truly bizarre: e.g http://www.xxx.com/uk/blog/cat/view/identifier/news/page/news/index.php/alarms-doorbells/?p=2 Alarms and doorbells is one of our product categories, which is displayed in the LHN on the blog page but has nothing to do with the blog itself. On another site on the same Magento instance, with the same content (they're for two different regions) we're show as having 248 duplicate pages, again in the video and news section, but this is a completely different scale of issue. Has anyone else encountered issues like these? I'm probably going to put a noindex in place on these two sections until we can get a solution in place as we're completely unranked in google on this site. Thanks
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
Duplicate content + wordpress tags
According to SEOMoz platform, one of my wordpress websites deals with duplicate content because of the tags I use. How should I fix it? Is it loyal to remove tag links from the post pages?
Technical SEO | | giankar0 -
How critical is Duplicate content warnings?
Hi, So I have created my first campaign here and I have to say the tools, user interface and the on-page optimization, everything is useful and I am happy with SEOMOZ. However, the crawl report returned thousands of errors and most of them are duplicate content warnings. As we use Drupal as our CMS, the duplicate content is caused by Drupal's pagination problems. Let's say there is a page called "/top5list" , the crawler decided /top5list?page=1" to be duplicate of "/top5list". There is no real solution for pagination problems in Drupal (as far as I know). I don't have any warnings in Google's webmaster tools regarding this and my sitemap I submitted to Google doesn't include those problematic deep pages. (that are detected as duplicate content by SEOMOZ crawler) So my question is, should I be worried about the thousands of error messages in crawler diagnostics? any ideas appreciated
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
Is 100% duplicate content always duplicate?
Bit of a strange question here that would be keen on getting the opinions of others on. Let's say we have a web page which is 1000 lines line, pulling content from 5 websites (the content itself is duplicate, say rss headlines, for example). Obviously any content on it's own will be viewed by Google as being duplicate and so will suffer for it. However, given one of the ways duplicate content is considered is a page being x% the same as another page, be it your own site or someone elses. In the case of our duplicate page, while 100% of the content is duplicate, the page is no more than 20% identical to another page so would it technically be picked up as duplicate. Hope that makes sense? My reason for asking is I want to pull latest tweets, news and rss from leading sites onto a site I am developing. Obviously the site will have it's own content too but also want to pull in external.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Duplicate content and URL's
Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne
Technical SEO | | wazza19850