3 Different Home Page URL's Being Indexed?
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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...
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Good stuff! Thanks again, Bevelwise!!
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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
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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.
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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.
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