PortfolioID urls appearing in my wordpress site- what to do?
-
Hey guys,
Hoping someone may have some advice on a wordpress site.
Most of their URL's are duplicates due to a PortfolioID appearing in the URLs causing a duplicate title tags
It's the same page but it's being flagged as duplicate.Would you remove the portfolioID url or 301 redirect?
Many thanks
Simon -
Generally I'd not worry too much about duplicate warnings like this, especially if the duplicate pages are being created by parameters. Though Moz won't be able to see it, check Google's search console (AKA webmaster tools) under parameters to see how many portfolio IDs are being crawled. You can even set the parameter manually, though I find "Let Googlebot decide" usually works just fine.
The canonical tag is a good idea. Definitely use a canonical tag that to point back to the original version of the page. Without seeing the site I can't give you more specific info than that.
I'd probably not use robots.txt, just because I'd worry your content would be harder to crawl once a session is tagged with profile ID. It all depends on where users/bots pick up the profile ID variable from.
-
Simon, I'm not sure where you're seeing the duplicates, but generally speaking there are a few ways to deal with this:
-
use the robots.txt file to disallow indexing of the duplicate URLs (keep them but disallow from being indexed if they're helpful for users
-
remove the PortfolioIDs entirely from the site. If they're not needed and they're not helpful to users then I would remove them entirely.
-
set up canonical tags so that even though they're crawled they will still pass on the credit to the main URL.
-
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
-
Why is this site ranking higher?
We've put a fair bit of effort into delivering value here: https://lewescountycars.co.uk/ But a search for "Lewes taxis" or "taxis Lewes" puts this site above us: https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/ As you can you see, this is a tiny site that we outperform in most ways.... what can we do to rank above it that we haven't already done? Thanks in advance - Gerard.
Technical SEO | | Paul7301 -
Error: The URL you entered does not appear to be returning a page successfully
I keep getting the above error when I'm trying to look at the page optimization for a new blog page we have uploaded. It was posted over a week ago, so I assumed it would be indexed by now. Any thoughts on why it isn't working? The page is: http://www.esg.co.uk/blog/blog/2015/why-is-air-quality-testing-so-important/#.VmlBmLiLRpg Thanks
Technical SEO | | Charley_Tangerine0 -
Partner Sites
Hi All, Within our company we have a media group that publishes magazines and videos, the sites have footers that link to our shopping site, one of them has 118,459 links to one URL, domain authority 23, and the other 17,726 to seven URLs, domain authority 52, (there are some articles which link organically). My question is are these links because they're from identifiable companies with the same ownership worth keeping or are they detrimental? The site being linked to has a DA of 39 Cheers Stew
Technical SEO | | StewMcG0 -
One site per location or all under and umbrella site?
I am working on a project where we are re-branding lots (100+) existing local business under one national brand. I am wondering what we should do with their existing websites, they are generally fairly poor and will need re-designing to match the new brand but may have some residual links? 301 redirect the URL to the national site, e.g. nationalsite.com/localbusinessA? If so what should I look out for? Do I need to specifically redirect any pages that have links to them to the same pages on the new site? Or should I give them a new standalone website that they link back to the national brand site? More than likely this will be hosted on the same server and CMS as the main site just the URL will remain Do I need to make sure that any old URL's that had links to them are 301'd to the new pages? Many thanks for you advice.
Technical SEO | | BadgerToo0 -
Wordpress multilanguage sitemaps
Hi, I have a multilingual wordpress site. which is in Bulgarian and English - translated using qtranslate. The xml sitemap of the 2 languages is in one sitemap file- all the links for the Bulgarian and English version are in one file. (Our web is using this plugin - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-v3-for-qtranslate Do you have any idea how can I make separate xml sitemap for every language? I ask you here because may be you have identical problems with your multilanguage wordpress website. You can see the sitemap with 2 languages links in one sitemap here: http://cholakovit.com/ sitemap.xml Cholakov IT I have read from this article that it is better practise and also it will help with geo-targetazing your web site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic
Technical SEO | | vladokan0 -
On-site adjustment opinions
Hi folks, I've got a fairly interesting scenario. I'm trying to rank this page (http://www.staysa.co.za/sa/1-2-0-0-1/East-London/accommodation) better for the term, "accommodation east london". The client isn't keen on making many changes and it was built horribly with ASP, half CMS, half not. I have made the following changes today: I introduced two paragraphs of text below the H1 tag. I changed "East London Bed and Breakfast", "East London Conference Venues", "East London Cottage / Chalet" to just "Bed and Breakfast", "Conference Venues", "Cottage / Chalet" as the continual key phrase duplication in my experience is a bad move. I've made a change to the title tag (this is a huge mission as it's not CMS controlled, so I had to teach myself some basic ASP to do so). Meta data.. nightmare to change unfortunately, at least not without rewriting part of the CMS. I'm wondering, are there any other on-site factors that I'm missing? I'm not a fan of site-wide links, so I don't want to put an exact match anchor text link from the sidebar/footer to the page, not unless someone can motivate why I should. Keen to hear everyone's opinions 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
Should we introduce subfolders into the URLs on a new site?
A site we are working on currently gives no indication of the subfolders in the URL. Eg. the site uses: www.examplesite.com/brand-name Rather than: www.examplesite.com/popular-products/brand-name There are breadcrumbs on site to show the user what part of the site they are in and how they navigated there. We are building a new site and have to decide what route to take: Since the site is already performing relatively well in the SERPs and the URLs are nice and short this way, is it a good idea to keep them like this or is it better for usability to include the subfolders? This post suggests that we would be best off to keep the URLs as they are - particularly since less would be changed http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo Thanks in advance for your opinions! Liz @lizstraws
Technical SEO | | oneresult0 -
Canonical on ecommerce site
I have read tons of guides about canonical implementaiton but still am confused about how I should best use it. On my site with tens of thousands of urls and thousands of afiiliates and shopping networks sending traffic, is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url. In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes? Is there a better way to handle this? Also is there any potential problems with rolling out the tag to all pages if they are simply refrencing themselves in the tag? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Gordian0