Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why do I have 2 different URL's for the same page - is this good practice?
-
Hi GuysMy father is currently using a programmer to build his new site. Knowing a little about SEO etc, I was a little suspicious of the work carried out. **Anyone with good programming and SEO knowledge, please offer your advice!**This page http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/gallery-range-wood-flooring/ which is soon to be http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/ you'll see has a number of different products. The products on this particular page have been built into colour categories like thishttp://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/beiges http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks This is fine. Eventually when we add to our selection of woods, we'll easily segment each product into "colour categories" for users to easily navigate to. My question is - Why do I have 2 different URL's for the same page - is this good practice? Please see below... Visible URL - http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/cipressa/Below is the permalink seen in Word Press for this page also.Permalink: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/and in the Word Press snippet shows the same permalink urlCipressa | Engineered Brown Wood | The Wood Gallerieswww.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/
Buy Cipressa Engineered Brown Wood, available at The Wood Galleries, London. Provides an Exceptional Foundation for Elegant Décor, Extravagant ..
If this is completely ok and has no negative search impact - then I'm happy. If not what should I advise to my programmer to do?
Your help would be very much appreciated.
Regards
Faye
-
The site has been in progress for months now. During this time the company has developed some outstanding suppliers and subsequently more products have been added. Because of this we had to rethink the website structure by adding product categories. This has allowed us to implement cleaner urls which are better for SEO, as well as categorising our products which will provide a better user experience for our customers. It also provides the platform to add more products in the future.
I really appreciate you help Linda. I wanted to ask questions on here before getting in touch with my programmer.
This has confirmed my concerns as to "why" this has happened.
Thank you.
-
Agreed, no one should do 301 redirects for no reason. As I asked earlier, why does the other URL exist? If this is all being set up new, it should only be using the new, well-organized path. (Unless there are multiple paths that one can go through to arrive at that page and the developer wants them all to resolve to one, clean URL.) I think your best bet would be to just ask your programmer why.
-
Hi Linda
I'm aware of the purposes of 301's, but why do we have this, is the question? This is a company that has yet to begin advertising or trading, so there is no relevance its purposes?
Sure, if this page had link juice pointing to it, then a 301 would be required of course. But for a new start up, with completely unique pages - I'm not so sure my programmer is implementing best practice.
-
There is a URL: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/ and it's been around for a while, maybe has some links, built up some authority.
Now the organization of the site is being improved and the better URL: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/cipressa/ is to be used for the content that is on that page.
How does the authority of the old page get to the new page? With a 301 redirect. If this is not done, when someone goes to the old URL (maybe it's linked from somewhere, maybe they have a bookmark), they get a 404 error. When Google looks at links that go to the old URL, it wants to credit the links to that page, but that page does not exist anymore as far as Google knows. Google does not know there is a new page with the same information.
For you, the page is that one post in Wordpress or wherever and that stays the same—you are just renaming it. For Google, those two URLs are different pages and in order to tell Google that the one has become the other, you need to 301 redirect it.
-
Hi O2C
Forgive me but I disagree.
Canonical – Hey, (most) Search Engines: I have multiple versions of this page (or content), please only index this version. I'll keep the others available for people to see, but don't include them in your index and please pass credit to my preferred page.
We do not have multiple page versions which are the same, just the one unique for each - hence my "redirect" concern.
-
I would definitely add rel canonical tags to the website pages to let Google know which is the original page as Robert has suggested.
-
Hi Linda
Thanks for your input regarding this.
The only URL we require is http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/cipressa/. This is based on our organisation of each product by "type" - "colour" - "brand name".
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys/
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/beiges/
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks
We have the same for other products, http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/parquet-reclaimed/lights-greys/ and http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/prefinished-wood/lights-greys/ - and so on.
All that we require is for each URL to be changed accordingly, not to be redirected with a 301? As far as I'm aware, this page is not needed, is not part of our structure, but still exists as a 301.. Permalink: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/ ??
-
The URL that is being redirected to is the cleaner URL and also seems to make sense organizationally, which is why I would have gone with that structure from the start.
The question here is why does the other URL exist? Was the older site using that format? In that case, the new programmer is setting up a better organized structure for your father and doing the appropriate redirects, which is a good thing. The new URL will not be an incorrect URL, it will be the correct URL for that page.
-
Is a 301 redirect really necessary for a site such as this? I would like to know if what has been implemented is good practice?
I also do not want to "advertise" what is effectively an incorrect url (however similar), as this will be seen seen in the search engines?
Another possible downside of the 301 is that it does sometimes take a while for the search engines to attribute a page with the search authority of your the original page.
It seems to me a 301 redirect is not "best practice" for a new site with 70 individual "unique" products?
-
Hi Faye,
It looks like the 2nd URL you provided is already 301 redirecting to the first URL so you shouldn't have to worry about it.
Hope that helps!
-
That permalink already 301 redirects to the visible URL in your example and wouldn't cause duplicate content. Sometimes in order to show a nicer-looking link people will use aliases. I do not know why in this case the two structures are needed since it seems the visible link could handle the categories, but then I do not know what all the complexities are—you could ask the programmer why.
-
To answer your question: No, it's not okay. Duplicate content is to be avoided. Ask your programmer to do a 301 redirect one of these pages to another, that automatically redirects users and the GoogleBot, or at least add an canonical url meta tag which defines which page is the "original" or "canonical" version for the content.
See more at Google Support.
As to why it is happening. Difficult to be precise but would venture that one of the URL-s might be a category "page" that gets created automatically, with an url thanks to your page's category structure and the other a real editable "page".
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
-
Will shortening down the amount of text on my pages affect it's SEO performance?
My website has several pages with a lot of text that becomes pretty boring. I'm looking at shortening down the amount of copy on each page but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally. Will shortening down the current copy have a negative effect on my SEO performance?
On-Page Optimization | | Liquid20150 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Duplicate URL's in Sitemap? Is that a problem?
I submitted a sitemap to on Search Console - but noticed that there are duplicate URLs, is that a problem for Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Luciana_BAH0 -
Should I redirect mobile traffic to a different url? Will it hurt SEO?
I'm working on a site that has lots of great content and ranks well but essentially the money is generated by affiliate links. I don't have a mobile version of the site but the company I'm affiliated with does offer a mobile redirect to their domain. Will redirecting mobile traffic to a different url hurt my SEO? I think the user will get a better experience by landing on a mobile page but I don't know if google will see it like that. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Using phrases like 'NO 1' or 'Best' int he title tag
Hi All, Quick question - is it illegal, against any rule etc to use phrases such as 'The No 1 rest of the title tag | Brand Name' on a site?
On-Page Optimization | | Webrevolve0 -
How to properly remove pages and a category from Google's index
I want to remove this category http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ and all the pages in that category (e.g. http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/7386.html ) from Google's index. I used the following string in the "Reomval URS" section in Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/* is that correct or I better use http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ ? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | VinceWicks0 -
Page title getting cut off in SERPS even though it's under 70 characters?
I re-wrote the page title of a home page for a site I'm working on and made sure it's under 70 characters (68 to be exact) to comply with best practices and make sure it doesn't get cut-off in the SERPS. It's still getting cut-off though and right when it gets to the brand/website name. Does a "-" have anything to do with it? Does that translate to an elipsis? Format: keywords - website/brand.com Can anybody tell me why this would be happening?
On-Page Optimization | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5