URL Capitalization Inconsistencies Registering Duplicate Content Crawl Errors
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Hello,
I have a very large website that has a good amount of "Duplicate Content" issues according to MOZ. In reality though, it is not a problem with duplicate content, but rather a problem with URLs. For example: http://acme.com/product/features and http://acme.com/Product/Features both land on the same page, but MOZ is seeing them as separate pages, therefor assuming they are duplicates.
We have recently implemented a solution to automatically de-captialize all characters in the URL, so when you type acme.com/Products, the URL will automatically change to acme.com/products – but MOZ continues to flag multiple "Duplicate Content" issues. I noticed that many of the links on the website still have the uppercase letters in the URL even though when clicked, the URL changes to all lower case. Could this be causing the issue?
What is the best way to remove the "Duplicate Content" issues that are not actually duplicate content?
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http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
"Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement."
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If you check Google Analytics, GA is probably seeing it too. We had a similar problem. Canonicalization will help with duplicate content, but it won't help with rankings. Internally, you are sending link juice to multiple versions of the same page. In addition, you could have backlinks pointing at multiple duplicate pages, and splitting the link love.
Canonicalization does not transfer link juice the way a 301 Redirect does. All the canonical tag does is tell Google "Rank This Page". If you don't care about rankings the canonical is fine. If you do care, you need to 301 all of your pages to the lower case version.
If you decide to 301, first, build an HTML sitemap with all of the uppercase URLs. After you do the 301, have Google fetch the sitemap and submit it, This will help Googlebot wind all of the pages that were 301ed.
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Hey man. If your store is a Magento store, there are settings for adding canonicalization tags to categories and products under:
System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization
h/t to Yoast for reminding me of the string to get there.
I am optimizing a Magento store that had a similar issue after a relaunch. Found that to be a very easy way to fix it.
Hope this helps.
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I have a complex CMS for my main website; I just asked my developer to do it. On my Wordpress sites, I use an SEO plugin for this (Yoast).
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Thank you so much Linda.
Do you know of a fast way to add a rel=canonical tag to all the pages, the website is quite large, and it would likely take months over months to do it manually.
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Hi,
There is the same question here on moz: Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
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The best way to fix this is with a rel=canonical URL. Tag each page with the lower-case version. (I had this same problem.)
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