Codeigniter - Controller and duplicate pages

[CarloShellaMascella]

Hi there,

I use Codeigniter as framework and I have a question about the duplicate page.

Actually, for default, the typical page in a CodeIgniter framework is something like this:

http://www.domain.com/site/contact

where site is the controller containing the contact function that point to the contact.html view...

To have a better URL I use a trick with the "routes" that redirect any http://www.domain.com/contact to the original http://www.domain.com/site/contact

Of course the both are valid and the both are... crawled! So I get the duplicate page.

Is this something I have to manage, maybe with .htaccess?

Any idea would be very appreciated.

Thanks for you precious time guys!

Shella

[KaneJamison]

I'm not familiar with CodeIgniter, but this isn't terribly different from how Wordpress and other PHP-based CMSs manage permalinks.

Currently you're simply forwarding shortened URLs (/contact/) to the actual URL (/site/contact/), which isn't ideal. It would be preferable to remove the base path (/site/) from the URL completely.

This guide (http://www.web-and-development.com/codeigniter-remove-index-php-minimize-url/) has a good rundown on how to control this in .htaccess. I believe that the sections titled "Removing 1st URL segment" and "Routing automatically" are going to be the ones that are applicable to your case, because you're trying to change the controller.

You should also take a look through the original documentation at http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/general/urls.html.

You're also going to want to make sure that any canonicals being used in the match the intended URL, and that any incorrect URLs (eg /site/contact/) are 301 redirecting to the proper URL (eg /contact/). Use wheregoes.com and type in the /site/contact/ version of the URL to test this - it should spit out "301 redirect" not "302" or anything else.

If you're not really comfortable messing around with htaccess, I'd highly recommend trying this out on a development server and making sure it all works correctly before you move it to a live server.