3 Different Home Page URL's Being Indexed?
-
Hello Everyone!
I own a dog supplies eCom site on the x-cart platform. I recently upgraded to 4.4 version about 3 weeks ago and am noticing 3 different home page URL's getting indexed and ranked:
/
/home.php
/home.php?cat=I dont know why this is happening and I dont claim to be an expert SEO but know this cant be good! I am seeing high rankings on certain terms for all 3 URL's. Has anyone seen this before and can anyone give me any feedback on this and how it may be effecting my sites ranking in the future?
Thanks in advance!
Byron- -
I'm not a dev. Personally I stay at least ten feet away from any code when possible
I'll respond to the site form rather than here regarding SEO services... no longer an independent consultant...
-
Good stuff! Thanks again, Bevelwise!!
-
Thanks again Alan. i will send this to my dev. and see if he can do what you say. If not, do you do this sort of thing? Actually, I just spent most of my budget (and then some!) on the new site but will need an SEO to take a look at it soon.
I actually went to your site and filled out the form as I am interested in more backlinks
-
Duplicate content is never a good thing and can be handled a number of different ways. In this case I would do a number of things to make sure you are not causing confusion and ultimately segmenting out the link profile between multiple url's. I would
- 301 redirect /home.php to /
- Install a canonical tag on the home page
- If you don't already have your Google webmaster tools registered go do that, and then under site configuration use parameter handling tell Google to ignore the query string parameter ?cat= and set that to ignore.
Even though you are getting multiple versions of your home page ranked, are they for different keywords? I believe that if you fixed the duplicate content issues you would retain your rankings with your consolidated home page.
-
while you may be seeing a short-term advantage to leaving all versions untouched, having multiple versions of any individual URL indexed ultimately causes long term confusion and degradation to the site's overall SEO.
In X-Cart, you can either use an SEO redirect plug-in or have a custom .htaccess file created to resolve this. Either one requires a proper understanding of SEO, specific to this type of ecommerce system.
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
-
Redirect chains error on the home page URL
Hello Everyone, I'm getting redirect chains error on the home page URL:
On-Page Optimization | | Nikhil_Falcon
http://ebitdacatalyst.com in Wordpress. I've checked my redirection list in the plugin, and haven't found any redirections on http://ebitdacatalyst.com. Can anyone please help me in solving this issue? I don't know where from it's coming.0 -
Can bots crawl this homepage's content?
The website is https://ashleydouglas.com.au/ I tried using http://www.seo-browser.com/ to see if bots could see the content on the site, but the tool was unable to retrieve the page. I used mobile-friendly test and it just rendered some menu links - no content and images. I also used Fetch and Render on Search Console. The result for 'how google sees the page' and 'how a visitor sees the page' are the same and only showing the main header image. Anything below isn't shown. Does this mean that bots can't actually read all content on the page past the header image? I'm not well versed with what's going on with the code. Why are the elements below the header not rendering? Is it the theme? Plugins? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez0 -
Two links to different page with same link label
What will be the impact in Google if I have two links in the same page pointing to different pages, but with the same label.
On-Page Optimization | | kjerstibakke0 -
What is the fastest way to re-index an important page?
Hello Moz Community Members, Besides submitting the URL in Google Webmaster, what are other ways to make sure google indexes/crawls a page which was noindexed?
On-Page Optimization | | SEMEnthusiast0 -
Are there any SEO benefits changing the default home page filename (index.htm) to a keyword rich filename
II'm a newbie. I have a website using the default home page filename: index.htm. I have total control over the web server. I was wondering whether I can get any SEO improvements for my main keyword if I change the default filename with a filename that contains the main keyword, like our-main-product.htm (doing the 301 redirect and changing the server search order, of course)?
On-Page Optimization | | Grafimart0 -
Long or Short URLs. Who's Coming to Dinner?
This has been discussed on the forums in some regard. My situation. Example 1 Long Keyword URL: www.abctown.com/keyword-for-life-helping-keywords-everywhere-rank-better Example 2 Short Keyword URL: www.abctown.com/keyword In both examples I want to improve rankings for the "keyword" phrase. My current URL is example 1. And I've landed a page one ranking in Google (7) with that URL. In attempts to improve rankings further (top 5), I was toying with the idea of going simpler with all my URLs in favor of the example 2 model. Might this method help or hurt my current rankings? In recent articles I've read it seems that going with the simpler more human approach to my SEO efforts. Any thought would be appreciated. Cheers,
On-Page Optimization | | creativedepartment0 -
Has anyone with a high number of home page tiles been effected by the panda/farmer update?
One of the sites I'm working on seems to have dropped a few spots in rankings. It has numerous home page tiles, but they are not really advertising; just links to different sections on the site. Does anyone think that might be a factor in the rankings drop?
On-Page Optimization | | J.Marie0 -
Post Title - Use the blog's name or not?
In the tile of my post, shoudl I used my blog's name in it at the end or emit the blog name. EX: title of post with keywords | name of blog OR EX: title of post with keywords The site's name is 3 words long, so I'm worrying that those extra words are diluting the keywords in the post's name that I'm trying to target.
On-Page Optimization | | gregalam0