Duplicate content? Split URLs? I don't know what to call this but it's seriously messing up my Google Analytics reports

[DMoff]

Hi Friends,

This issue is crimping my analytics efforts and I really need some help.  I just don't trust the analytics data at this point.  I don't know if my problem should be called duplicate content or what, but the SEOmoz crawler shows the following URLS (below) on my nonprofit's website.  These are all versions of our main landing pages, and all google analytics data is getting split between them.  For instance, I'll get stats for the /camp page and different stats for the /camp/ page. In order to make my report I need to consolidate the 2 sets of stats and re-do all the calculations.  My CMS is looking into the issue and has supposedly set up redirects to the pages w/out the trailing slash, but they said that setting up the "ref canonical" is not relevant to our situation.

If anyone has insights or suggestions I would be grateful to hear them.  I'm at my wit's end (and it was a short journey from my wit's beginning ...)

Thanks.

URL

www.enf.org/camp

www.enf.org/camp/

www.enf.org/foundation

www.enf.org/foundation/

www.enf.org/Garden

www.enf.org/garden

www.enf.org/Hante_Adventures

www.enf.org/hante_adventures

www.enf.org/hante_adventures/

www.enf.org/oases

www.enf.org/oases/

www.enf.org/outdoor_academy

www.enf.org/outdoor_academy/

[AlanMosley]

Zsolt is correct.if you have a 301 redirecet to the slash, you must also have your internal links point at the slash, or visa versa if you 301 to non slash your internal links should do the same,

This is a common problem i find in WordPress sites.

Why this is important is each redirecet leaks a bit of link juice, site wide this adds up to a lot.

Your site has many html errors, another thing common to CMS.

unclosed tags can confuse a bot as to what is visible to the user

[sesertin]

Hello Dave!

As I see the redirection is in place and www.enf.org/camp redirects to www.enf.org/camp/ and so on with the othe urls: all of them redirects to the one ending with /. I think you should simply neglect the ones tat do not end this way as anyone opening them would end up on the www.enf.org/camp/ type, but that is not rue the other way. So if I type www.enf.org/camp/ will never see www.enf.org/camp.

Consequence: if you examine only www.enf.org/camp/ you get the number of people visiting www.enf.org/camp/ and www.enf.org/camp as well. This is true woith all the other ones. It is enough to examine the one the users are redirected to.

[RyanKent]

Hi Dave,

In short, you are suffering from issues related to URL standardization. First let me share a few URL facts which you may or may not be aware of:

http://www.enf.org and http://enf.org are two different URLs

www.enf.org/oases and www.enf.org/oases/ are two different URLs

www.enf.org/Garden and www.enf.org/garden are two different URLs

In each case you may choose to show the identical content on each version of the URL, but they are in fact two distinct web addresses. You could choose to offer completely different content on each URL. This issue causes many SEO problems. The issue can and should be fixed.

The solution is to implement a couple generic regex expressions for your site. The actual solution varies depending upon the technology used for your site.

Step 1 - Decide upon how you want your URLs to appear. Do you prefer a trailing slash? or no? Which method you use isn't as important as picking one solution and sticking with it. For capitalization, it is strongly recommended to always use lower case letters.

Step 2 - Ask your web host or developer to make the following site wide changes:

Remove the trailing slash from all URLs (or add a slash, depending upon your preferred choice)

Force all URLs to lowercase letters

Step 3 - Test the solution. Try accessing the alternate versions of URLs such as the ones you shared in the list above. Each web page should only be accessible via a single URL. All of the other versions should redirect to the preferred format.

Once the solution is implemented, expect it to take about a month for all the changes to be captured by Google, then examine your reports again. They should appear much cleaner.