Google Treating these URL's as diff, but they are same. please help
-
Google is treating, below URL's as two different URL's when they are same. How to solve this. Please help. Case 1:/2570/Venture-Capital-and-Capital-Markets/2570/venture-capital-and-capital-marketsCase 2: /xxx/Java-Programming//xxx/Java-ProgrammingPlease help, how to solve this. Thanks in advance
-
Sounds like you're on .NET (or something case-sensitive). The best way to deal with this in my opinion is at the server level, by only allowing lowercase URLs. This is how you would implement this in .NET:
<match url="[A-Z]" ignorecase="false"></match>
<action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" appendquerystring="true"></action>
Canonical tags are technically an option, but you will have to manually add them each and every time this issue occurs (and stay on top of it as an ongoing action item). It's almost always preferable to have each page accessible from a single URL if at all possible. Automatically adding self-referencing canonicals would probably just exacerbate the problem since they uppercase pages would still be pointing to the uppercase pages, lowercase to lowercase, etc.
I would strongly suggest defaulting to lowercase over uppercase URLs to stay consistent with other sites on the internet (also, most linking sites will assume lowercase when linking to your site).
The good news is this a fairly common, fixable problem
If your site is in fact using .NET, this article is a good starting point (#2 is where I got the above code snippet from).
-
What you're dealing with is duplicate content caused by URL inconsistencies. My first move would be to implement rel="canonical" tags to tell search bots which is the preferred URL (lower-case, then either with or without the trailing-slash). You can read more about it here: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
I always use the Moz bar on the actual Moz site to see how things should be implemented - that's allowed, right? & I noticed that they have added rel=canonical site-wide (to prevent any unforeseen dup content issues). You can see an example of how it's used by viewing the source code here: moz.com/rand/category/archives/events/ and http://moz.com/rand/category/events/
Before you take any action, though, **you need to determine the preferred structure for all URLs on the site. **
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
-
301 and the base URL
Hi, please bear with me as I'm pretty new to all this! I've my base URL but obviously want to add keywords to it for seo purposes. Should I redirect from the base URL to the URL with the keywords appended? So my landing page goes from say www.moz.com to www.moz.com/keywords-here. If I do that, should I replicate all the meta data (descriptions etc) on the original landing page? Or does it not matter? Thanks, Nick
On-Page Optimization | | nickwoodward0 -
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 -
Can someone help with Canonical?
I have a wordpress site that On-Page Grader is saying I don't have Canonical done correctly. Here is the comment. Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL. Recommendation: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. I have quite a few sites and have never had an issue with this. Can anyone help? I tried installing a plugin but that seems to have made it worse. This is the front page of the site btw.
On-Page Optimization | | jonnyholt1 -
Google cache tool help
This link is for the Ebay Google cache - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ebay.com&strip=1 I wanted to do the same for my homepage so I switched out the urls and it worked. When I try to get a different link in there such as mysite.com/category it wont work. I know my pages are indexed. Any ideas why it wont work for other pages?
On-Page Optimization | | EcommerceSite0 -
Can't find Text-Only Cached version in Google search
Hi, I'm trying to view the text-only of a webpage to run a SEO audit, however Google does not give me this option. When i click the two arrows that appear to the right of a search result, the only option I get is Cached. Is there a reason this might be happening? I've tried clearing my cookies, signing out of Google, and anything else I could find on my troll of the internet. I also tried text, only please! however whether this works or not is debatable considering it shows me actual pictures on the site. Any ideas, or maybe another add-on that will work?
On-Page Optimization | | JuiceBoxOM0 -
ECommerce URL's
This is based on a clothing retailer, eCommerce site. In an effort to reduce the length of our product names, we are considering removing terms like long-sleeve, short-sleeve, etc., but leaving that information in the URL. Now, the concern is that we would lose some traction in the SERP's if those descriptive words are left out as the product name is also our page title. Then I think keywords as broad as long-sleeve shirt wouldn't serve us well anyways. One idea we have is that the alt tag on the product image could still display the longer product name that would include long-sleeve, etc. thus having the keyword on the product page. Any ideas or suggestions? Hope this is clear. Seems redundant from a user standpoint to state long-sleeve, etc. in every product name. Thanks - your answers are always so helpful!
On-Page Optimization | | kennyrowe0 -
Numbers in URL's - Search friendly or not?
Hi Mozzers, I have a client who has just launched a new website and we are having difficulties in making the URL's search friendly. I wont get into the technical aspects, but I'll explain the potential solutions the developers have given me. current: www.site.com/en/product/browse-by-product/37/22 Where 'en' stands for the English version of the website, 37 is the product category for example 'hard drives', and 22 is the product name or example 'seagate' Option to fix; www.site.com/en/p/product/hard-drives-37/seagate-22 This optional fix reduces the word product down to p, reduces 'browse by product' to 'product' and inserts the category and product names. Note the category identifier '37' has to be included in the URL, and the product identifier '22' also has to be in the URL. Obviously this is not great, but it is required at the moment. Best case scenario would be to have the URL like this... www.site.com/en/hard-drives/seagate So my question is, how far off the best case scenario is the option to fix? Scale of 1 to 10 would be good?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeyDorrington0 -
Is it worth changing urls with underscores?
A few pages on one of my sites have underscores linking keywords rather than hyphens (keywords_and_keyword rather than keyword-and-keyword). Possibly from a time before I knew hyphens were preferred... One of the pages ranks well, and drives a good amount of traffic. The others do not do so well, but are still within the top 10 landing pages for the site. Is it worth me changing the underscores to hyphens (setting up 301 redirects first of course) or doesn't it make that much difference?
On-Page Optimization | | Jingo010