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
-
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
URL Parameters
On our webshop we've added some URL-parameters. We've set URL's like min_price, filter_cat, filter_color etc. on "don't Crawl" in our Google Search console. We see that some parameters have 100.000+ URL's and some have 10.000+ Is it better to add these parameters in the robots.txt file? And if that's better, how can we write it down so the URL's will not be crawled. Our robotos.txt files shows now: # Added by SEO Ultimate's Link Mask Generator module User-agent: * Disallow: /go/ # End Link Mask Generator output User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Site hacked in Jan. Redeveloped new site. Still not ranking. Should we change domain?
Our top ranking site in the UK was hacked at the end of 2014. http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/ The site was the subject of a manual spam action from Google. After several unsuccessful attempts to clean it up, using Securi.net and reinstating old versions of the site, changing passwords etc. we took the decision to redevelop the site. We also changed hosting provider as we had received absolutely no support from them whatsoever in resolving the issue. So far we have: Removed the old website files off the server Developed a new website having implemented 301's for all the old URL's (except the spam ones) Submitted a reconsideration request for the manual spam action, which was accepted. Disavowed all the spammy inbound links through Webmaster Tools Implemented custom URL parameters through Google to not index the SPAM URLs ( which were using parameters) Our organic traffic is down by 63% compared to last year, and we are not ranking for most of our target keywords any longer. Is there anything that I am missing in the actions I have taken so far? We were advised that at this stage changing domain and starting again might be the way to go. However the current domain has been used by us since 2007, so it would be a big call. Any advice is appreciated, thanks. Sue - http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | galwaygirl0 -
Unique URLs for each local office 301 to parent site
I have a dentist who has multiple locations and a unique domain for each location. www.DentalCareofLacey.com www.DentalCareofSumner.com www.DentalCareofVashon.com The current plan is to setup 301s to redirect to the parent site (www.atlasdentistry.com/locations/lacey). Would there be any negative impact if we continue to purchase a unique domain for each branch office and just set it as a 301 to the parent site? Does having too many 301 redirects look too spammy to Google?
Technical SEO | | marlattts0 -
URL Changes And Site Map Redirects
We are working on a site redesign which will change/shorten our url structure. The primary domain will remain the same however most of the other urls on the site are getting much simpler. My question is how should this be best handled when it comes to sitemaps because there are massive amounts of URLS that will be redirected to the new shorter URL how should we best handle our sitemaps? Should a new sitemap be submitted right at launch? and the old sitemap removed later. I know that Google does not like having redirects in sitemaps. Has anyone done this on a large scale, 60k URLs or more and have any advice?
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC0 -
Why does my mobile site have a "?mobiRedirect=1" string at the end of the URL?
Hello, When trying to access my site from a smart-phone, I'm getting a redirected to the mobile version (which is correct), however at the end of the URL there is a redirect string that shows every time. I'm not sure why its its showing or how it automatically gets appended to the end of the URL each time. How can I configure my mobile site to prevent the ?mobiRedirect=1" from showing? For example, if you search for "Columbus Regional Health" on Google with a smart-phone, the first result should be for www.crh.org. If you click that, you should get redirected to www.crh.org/mobile , however its displaying the URL as http://www.crh.org/mobile/default.aspx?mobiRedirect=1 Does anyone know how to fix this? Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Liamis
Brian0 -
Changing all urls
A client of mine has a wordpress website that is installed in a directory, called "site". So when you go to www.domain.com you are redirected to www.domain.com/site. We all know how bad it is to have a redirect fron your subdomain to another page. In this case I measured a loss of 5 points of page authority. The question is: what is the best practice to remove the "site" from the address and changing all the urls? Should I use the webmaster tool to tell to Google that the site is moving? It's not 100% true, cause the site is just moving one level up. Should I install a copy of the website under www.domain.com and just redirect 301 every old page to its new url? This way I think the site would be deindexet for 2/3 months. Any suggestions or tips welcome! Thanks DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
E-commerce site multi language product urls
Hi, On my E-commerce site I use optimized Url's (product names) with my native language (Hebrew) I am going to translate some of the product pages to English with differnat descriptions, correct layout, etc... But I was wandering about the product Url's. Should I stay with the original product URL and add a language parameter to the url? Should I add a completely new URL using the English product name? Of course what I'm worrying the most of is duplicate content. Thanks, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0