What is best practice for fixing urls that have duplicate content, non-static and other issues?
-
Hi,
I know there are several good answers regarding duplicate content issues on this website already, however I have a question that involves the best way to avoid negative SEO impacts if I change the urls for an ecommerce site. Basically a new client has the following website http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk and I notice that it suffers from duplicate content due to the http://www version and the non www version of the pages - this seems quite easy to fix using the guidance on this website. However I notice that the product page urls are far from ideal in that they have several issues including:-
(a) they are mostly too long
(b) don't include the keyword terms (in terms of best practice)
(c) they don't use Static URLS
An example of one these product urls would be http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk/plant-details.php?name=Autumn Glory&p_genus=Hebe&code=heagl&category=hebe
I'd like to address these issues, but the pages rank highly for the products themselves, therefore my question is what would you recommend I do to fix the urls without risking the high positions that many of these product pages have?
thanks,
Ben
-
you could introduce breadcrumbs. It will make the URL nicer in the search results of google without changing the URL!
-
Thanks Dirk, that is good to know. The pages do rank very well, so I think I'll ignore my previous thoughts regarding how the URLs should look/behave and leave them as they are for now.
Many thanks!
-
For the url's - my advice would be: if it ain't broken - don't fix it. While static url's may be the best situation - Google is quite capable to analyse the parameters in the url.
You could fix the url's & put 301 from the old to the new - but if the products rank well on the current url I wouldn't touch them. Check also this old post on webmaster central : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
While the main topic is unrelated to your question - this article http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html also gives you insight on how Google deals with parameters in the url.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Website blog is hacked. Whats the best practice to remove bad urls
Hello So our site was hacked which created a few thousand spam URLs on our domain. We fixed the issue and changed all the spam urls now return 404. Google index shows a couple of thousand bad URLs. My question is- What's the fastest way to remove the URLs from google index. I created a site map with sof the bad urls and submitted to Google. I am hoping google will index them as they are in the sitemap and remove from the index, as they return 404. Any tools to get a full list of google index? ( search console downloads are limited to 1000 urls). A Moz site crawl gives larger list which includes URLs not in Google index too. Looking for a tool that can download results from a site: search. Any way to remove the URLs from the index in bulk? Removing them one by one will take forever. Any help or insight would be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | ajiabs1 -
Google Appending Blog URL inbetween my homepage and product page is it issue with base url?
Hi All, Google Appending Blog URL inbetween my homepage and product page. Is it issue or base url or relative url? Can you pls guide me? Looking to both tiny url you will get my point what i am saying. Please help Thanks!
Technical SEO | | amu1230 -
Duplicate Content
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
Responsive Code Creating Duplicate Content Issue
Good morning, Our developers have recently created a new site for our agency. The site is responsive for mobile/tablets. I've just put the site through Screaming Frog and I've been informed of duplicate H2s. When I've looked at some of the page sources, there are some instances of duplicated H2s and duplicated content. These duplicates don't actually appear on the site, only in the code. When I asked the development guys about this, they advised this is duplicated because of the code for the responsive site. Will the site be negatively affected because of this? Not everything is duplicated, which leads me to believe it probably could have been designed better... but I'm no developer so don't know for sure. I've checked the code for other responsive sites and no duplicates can be found. Thanks in advance, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Duplicate content problem?
Hello! I am not sure if this is a problem or if I am just making something too complicated. Here's the deal. I took on a client who has an existing site in something called homestead. Files cannot be downloaded, making it tricky to get out of homestead. The way it is set up is new sites are developed on subdomains of homestead.com, and then your chosen domain points to this subdomain. The designer who built it has kindly given me access to her account so that I can edit the site, but this is awkward. I want to move the site to its own account. However, to do so Homestead requires that I create a new subdomain and copy the files from one to the other. They don't have any way to redirect the prior subdomain to the new one. They recommend I do something in the html, since that is all I can access. Am I unnecessarily worried about the duplicate content consequences? My understanding is that now I will have two subdomains with the same exact content. True, over time I will be editing the new one. But you get what I'm sayin'. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | devbook90 -
Duplicate Content on SEO Pages
I'm trying to create a bunch of content pages, and I want to know if the shortcut I took is going to penalize me for duplicate content. Some background: we are an airport ground transportation search engine(www.mozio.com), and we constructed several airport transportation pages with the providers in a particular area listed. However, the problem is, sometimes in a certain region multiple of the same providers serve the same places. For instance, NYAS serves both JFK and LGA, and obviously SuperShuttle serves ~200 airports. So this means for every airport's page, they have the super shuttle box. All the provider info is stored in a database with tags for the airports they serve, and then we dynamically create the page. A good example follows: http://www.mozio.com/lga_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/jfk_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/ewr_airport_transportation/ All 3 of those pages have a lot in common. Now, I'm not sure, but they started out working decently, but as I added more and more pages the efficacy of them went down on the whole. Is what I've done qualify as "duplicate content", and would I be better off getting rid of some of the pages or somehow consolidating the info into a master page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Multiple URLs and Dup Content
Hi there, I know many people might ask this kind of question, but nevertheless .... 🙂 In our CMS, one single URL (http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/) has been produced nearly 9000 times with strings like this: http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/$12203/$12204/$12204/ and this http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/$12203/$12204/$12205/ and so on and so on... Today, I wrote our IT-department to either a) delete the pages with the "strange" URLs or b) redirect them per 301 onto the "original" page. Do you think this was the best solution? What about implementing the rel=canonical on these pages? Right now, there is only the "original" page in the Google index, but who knows? And I don't want users on our site to see these URLs, so I thought deleting them (they exist only a few days!) would be the best answer... Do you agree or have other ideas if something like this happens next time? Thanx in advance...
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0