Why do I have 2 different URL's for the same page - is this good practice?

[Faye234]

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

[Faye234]

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.

[Linda-Vassily]

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.

[Faye234]

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.

[Linda-Vassily]

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.

[Faye234]

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.

[O2C]

I would definitely add rel canonical tags to the website pages to let Google know which is the original page as Robert has suggested.

[Faye234]

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/  ??

[Linda-Vassily]

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.

[Faye234]

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?

[RangeMarketing]

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!

[Linda-Vassily]

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.

[RobertJakobson]

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".