Bad Duplicate content issue

[nico86]

Hi,

for grappa.com I have about 2700 warnings of duplicate page content. My CMS generates long url like: http://www.grappa.com/deu/news.php/categoria=latest_news/idsottocat=5 and http://www.grappa.com/deu/news.php/categoria%3Dlatest_news/idsottocat%3D5 (this is a duplicated content).

What's the best solution to fix this problem? Do I have to set up a 301 redirect for all the duplicated pages or insert the rel=canonical or rel=prev,next ?

It's complicated becouse it's a multilingual site, and it's my first time dealing with this stuff.

Thanks in advance.

[Dr-Pete]

Your original question had two URLs, one of where the "=" was replaced with "%3D". If that was an actual crawled URL (and not a copy-and-paste error), then it's likely coming from bad links within your own site. That's malformed, so you should definitely check it out. A desktop crawler like Xenu or Screaming Frog could help track down the culprit:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog

[nico86]

Thanks Peter for the reply!

What do you mean by "bad internal links" ?

I'm  well ranked so based on your suggestions what I have to do is to set up properly the rel=canonical tag and rel=alternate, right? I'm still bit scarred about duplicate content report  in the SEOmoz campaign. 2.700 warnings is kind of a big deal.

[Dr-Pete]

One of these URLs just seems to be the encoded version of the other, which should appear as identical. I'm not seeing any evidence that Google is indexing both. I have a feeling that you may have some bad internal links that need to be fixed. I'm seeing the English/German version of this page in the index, but that should be fine. As Khem said, you could use .

Be careful about converting to a "static" version. It's not that it's a bad idea, but the problem is that you could end up turning 2 duplicates into 3 duplicates. You'll still have to canonicalize the dynamic version to the static version. In other words, done badly, changing your URLs could actually make the problem worse.

[Dr-Pete]

Rel=prev/next is for paginated series, such as internal search results. While I see you have a pagination parameter on these pages ("idpagina=13"), it doesn't seem like this is a series or that the two pages are even duplicates. I'm a bit confused on the intent, but my initial reaction is that rel=prev/next doesn't fit the bill here.

[Khem_Raj7]

As long as you are managing a multilingual site, it is always recommended to use rel="alternative" even if you're redirecting your website.

For next, prev, don't use, unless you feel it is really required, as I could not find the need May be I missed something, could you be please bit more specific?

[nico86]

Thanks Raj! I will for sure re-write the dynamic urls into static and that's a starting point.  Take for example these pages:

http://www.grappa.com/eng/grappa.php/argomento=grappa_in_italy/idsezione=1/idpagina=13

http://www.grappa.com/eng/grappa_dettaglio.php/titolo=grappa_in_italy/idpagina=13/idnews=1/idsezione=1

Do you suggest in this case to use rel=nex, prev ?

I thought about using rel="alternate" for the multilingual issue, but now my site redirects automatically from www.grappa.com to www.grappa.com/eng/index.php. is that bad for SEO? Should I put rel="canonical" to www.grappa.com ?

Many thanks

[Khem_Raj7]

Hey Nicola, ~2700 is a huge no.

I would suggest you to talk to you programmer/developer to re-write the dynamic URLs into static, which I am sure they can easily do.

second thing, make sure to delete all the duplicate pages or use rel=unfollow. using 301 for all the duplicate pages is not a bad option but not a permanent solutions. It is better to re-write all the dynamics urls into static one, delete all the dups pages and then 301 redirect all the deleted pages to the originals.

for multilingual you can use the following code:

The tag enables you to say, “This is for Spain. this is for Germany

The rel="alternate" hreflang="es" annotations help Google serve the Spanish language or regional URL to searchers