3 Different Home Page URL's Being Indexed?
-
Hello Everyone!
I own a dog supplies eCom site on the x-cart platform. I recently upgraded to 4.4 version about 3 weeks ago and am noticing 3 different home page URL's getting indexed and ranked:
/
/home.php
/home.php?cat=I dont know why this is happening and I dont claim to be an expert SEO but know this cant be good! I am seeing high rankings on certain terms for all 3 URL's. Has anyone seen this before and can anyone give me any feedback on this and how it may be effecting my sites ranking in the future?
Thanks in advance!
Byron- -
I'm not a dev. Personally I stay at least ten feet away from any code when possible
I'll respond to the site form rather than here regarding SEO services... no longer an independent consultant...
-
Good stuff! Thanks again, Bevelwise!!
-
Thanks again Alan. i will send this to my dev. and see if he can do what you say. If not, do you do this sort of thing? Actually, I just spent most of my budget (and then some!) on the new site but will need an SEO to take a look at it soon.
I actually went to your site and filled out the form as I am interested in more backlinks
-
Duplicate content is never a good thing and can be handled a number of different ways. In this case I would do a number of things to make sure you are not causing confusion and ultimately segmenting out the link profile between multiple url's. I would
- 301 redirect /home.php to /
- Install a canonical tag on the home page
- If you don't already have your Google webmaster tools registered go do that, and then under site configuration use parameter handling tell Google to ignore the query string parameter ?cat= and set that to ignore.
Even though you are getting multiple versions of your home page ranked, are they for different keywords? I believe that if you fixed the duplicate content issues you would retain your rankings with your consolidated home page.
-
while you may be seeing a short-term advantage to leaving all versions untouched, having multiple versions of any individual URL indexed ultimately causes long term confusion and degradation to the site's overall SEO.
In X-Cart, you can either use an SEO redirect plug-in or have a custom .htaccess file created to resolve this. Either one requires a proper understanding of SEO, specific to this type of ecommerce system.
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
-
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 -
404's Wordpress products
Hi Guy's, On a Wordpress website we have a SEO Ultimate plugin running. Every day i get lot's of 404 errors of products that doesn't exist anymore (but are indexed, site: .... ). In the beginning we had lot's of testproduct that are not coming back in the shop. So i was wondering if there is a way to automaticly redirect product when there are out of stock, or not comming back anymore... So my 404's can be fixed. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Happy-SEO1 -
Changing the url of a page
Hello. I would like to change the url of a page. It currently has very few inbound links. I would set up a 301 redirect to the new url. Is there anything else I should take into account before changing the url? Is there a downside to changing a url? Do inbound links carry the same value when a 301 redirect is involved? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Prevent Indexing of URLs Based on Tags
I started my website as a blog over at Posterous, but decided to turn it into a full scale business website with a self-hosted WordPress theme. Shortly after transitioning from Posterous to WordPress, I noticed that Google was indexing not only my old blog posts, but the URLs of my blog posts based on the tags they have. Is there any reason why this is a problem? I'm sure it shouldn't qualify as duplicate content, but for some reason it just feels a bit sloppy to me to have all of these pages indexed...Is this a non-issue? Should I just be more discriminating with my use of 'tags' if it bothers me? JiGLH.png
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Adding keywords to URL's
I understand the importance of having the keyword in the URL (at least now I do). When I created my site (www.enchantingquotes.com), I was completely ignorant about SEO. So....question is...how do I go about adding keywords to already done pages? Do I create a new section and then redirect - or do I have to basically recreate pages? Thx much 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | enchantedgirlz0 -
Two different keywords - one URL
We're new to SEO, but have two keywords that are really not quite the same, but Google has targeted the same URL for us ... which means that SEO Moz is recommending we optimize the same URL, for opposite keywords (using the on page SEO). For example, the keywords (these aren't our keywords) of say, "beer brewing" and "ways to make beer for small breweries" are both pointing at our home page. The on page SEO is showing that "beer brewing" is a rank of say, a google ranking of 9. However, "ways to ..." is a google ranking of 47. So ... what am I supposed to do now? Do I rewrite the page to have "ways to ..." more prominent? I cannot really have the title and h1's include both ... What do I do now? We have about 3 or 4 of these "pairs". -- Anthony
On-Page Optimization | | apresley0 -
What is the best practice for changing a url of an existing page
I a looking through the on-page SEO reports in SEOmoz for one of my sites. It suggests that I change the url of a particular page to match the desired search term I want to rank for. In this case it is a site for a local business and the url is example.com/testimonials. when it probabaly should have instead been example.com/city-business-reviews. I have just a couple links to this page and I'm stuck towards the bottom of page 1 in the SERPs currently. Questions... 1. Should I change the url to include the exact keyword term I want the page to rank for? 2. If yes, what is the best method to ensure that any existing link juice to the current url is retained? Would I change the url, then create a new page with the old url and apply a 301 redirect to point it to the new page? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | fastestmanalive0 -
Value of PDF's in SEO
I have a client who has a lot of information in PDF form. They think they should move some of it over into HTML pages so it indexes better. Is there a benefit to converting these PDF's into HTML pages? It seems to me that HTML pages would be good, IF they are relevant pages that could be used online.
On-Page Optimization | | lvstrickland0