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
-
Duplicate 'meta title' issue (AMP & NON-AMP Pages)
how to fix duplicate meta title issue in amp and non-amp pages? example.com
On-Page Optimization | | 21centuryweb
example.com/amp We have set the 'meta title' in desktop version & we don't want to change the title for AMP page as we have more than 10K pages on the website. ----As per SEMRUSH Tool---- ABOUT THIS ISSUE It is a bad idea to duplicate your title tag content in your first-level header. If your page’s <title>and <h1> tags match, the latter may appear over-optimized to search engines. Also, using the same content in titles and headers means a lost opportunity to incorporate other relevant keywords for your page.</p> <p><strong>HOW TO FIX IT</strong></p> <p>Try to create different content for your <title> and <h1> tags.<br /><br />this is what they are recommending, for the above issue we have asked our team to create unique meta and post title for desktop version but what about AMP page?<br /><br />Please help!</p></title>0 -
Is using hyphens in a URL to separate words good practice?
Hi guys, I have a client who wants to use a hyphen to separate two words in the URL to make each work stand out. Is is good or bad practice to use a hyphen in a URL and will it affect rankings? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Address on Every page of the website for Local SEO? Good or Bad?
Is this good idea to add business address on every page of the website?, How Google see this? and This is Good or bad for ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | Dan_Brown10 -
How to Structure URL's for Multiple Locations
We are currently undergoing a site redesign and are trying to figure out the best way to structure the URL's and breadcrumbs for our many locations. We currently have 60 locations nationwide and our URL structure is as follows: www.mydomain.com/locations/{location} Where {location} is the specific street the location is on or the neighborhood the location is in. (i.e. www.mydomain.com/locations/waterford-lakes) The issue is, {location} is usually too specific and is not a broad enough keyword. The location "Waterford-Lakes" is in Orlando and "Orlando" is the important keyword, not " Waterford Lakes". To address this, we want to introduce state and city pages. Each state and city page would link to each location within that state or city (i.e. an Orlando page with links to "Waterford Lakes", "Lake Nona", "South Orlando", etc.). The question is how to structure this. Option 1 Use the our existing URL and breadcrumb structure (www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}) and add state and city pages outside the URL path: www.mydomain.com/{area} www.mydomain.com/{state} Option 2 Build the city and state pages into the URL and breadcrumb path: www.mydomain.com/locations/{state}/{area}/{location} (i.e www.mydomain.com/locations/fl/orlando/waterford-lakes) Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | uBreakiFix0 -
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 -
Does a page's url have any weight in Google rankings?
I'm sure this question must have been asked before but I can't find it. I'm assuming that the title tag is far more important than the page's url. Is that correct? Does the url have any relevance to Google?
On-Page Optimization | | rdreich490 -
How to Define Best URL Structure for Product Pages?
I am working on my website to edit structure with help of Google's search engine optimization starter guide. There is really good instruction to define URL structure which help us to perform well over Google's organic search. I have resolved issues regarding category pages but, I have confusion to define best URL structure for product pages. My website's product page URL structure is as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.html http://www.vistastores.com/homefurniture-winsomewood-93630.html URL structure is constructed with following terms. 1. Root Category Name (Market Umbrellas or Home Furniture or ....) 2. Brand Name 3. Manufacturer Part Number I am not happy with this structure and also not performing well over Google's organic search. I am thinking to include product name or title tag in URL after root domain. But, it may create very long URL and create issues in organic search display. Does it really matter to perform well over Google's organic search? How can I define best URL structure for product pages?
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit0 -
Is a Z almost as good as an S?
Possibly seems a strange question, but let me clarify... I have a new site in mind and all the domain names I was considering for it have been taken (I want a .com or a .net if at all possible). However, I can get the domain with a z at the end rather than an s Example: www.keyword-guides.com is taken, but www.keyword-guidez.com is available. Am I completely wrong in thinking that it will still match well for anyone searching Keyword Guide, and should match fairly well (even though it is a partial match) for people searching Keyword Guides. As the keyword is the most relevant bit of the domain, and as the first word on the domain is given the most weight, will having Z instead of S at the end make any difference at all? Personally, I don't really like the Z option, but if it would have no (or little) impact on my SEO efforts, I could live with it.
On-Page Optimization | | Jingo010
