Redirecting duplicate .asp pages??

[gdavies09031977]

Hi all,

I have a bit of a problem with duplicate content on our website. The CMS has been creating identical duplicate pages depending on which menu route a user takes to get to a product (i.e. via the side menu button or the top menu bar).

Anyway, the web design company we use are sorting it out going forward, and creating 301 redirects on the duplicate pages.

My question is, some of the duplicates take two different forms. E.g. for the home page:

www.<my domain="">.co.uk
www..<my domain="">.co.uk/index.html
www.<my domain="">.co.uk/index.asp</my></my></my>

Now I understand the 'index.html' page should be redirected, but does the 'index.asp' need to be directed also?

What makes this more confusing is when I run the SEOMoz diagnostics report (which brought my attention to the duplicate content issue in the first place - thanks SEOMoz), not all the .asp pages are identified as duplicates.

For example, the above 'index.asp' page is identified as a duplicate, but 'contact-us.asp' is not highlighted as a duplicate to 'contact-us.html'?

I'm a bit new to all this (I'm not a IT specialist), so any clarification anyone can give would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Gareth

[john4math]

ASP is dynamic. HTML is simply formatting of content. ASP streams HTML on output to the browser. You can do much much much more with ASP than with flat up HTML.

[gdavies09031977]

Excellent, thanks for your reply John. Just for my own personal understanding, what's the difference between a .html page and a .asp page? Cheers, Gareth

[john4math]

Yeah, if you're serving duplicate content under different URLs like this, it's best if you 301 redirect them all to the same URL.  So for your home page, you should redirect www.<my domain="">.co.uk/index.asp to www.<my domain="">.co.uk, for the same reason you want to redirect the www.<my domain="">.co.uk/index.html to www.<my domain="">.co.uk.  You should pick one URL for your contact us page as well, and redirect the duplicate versions to that.  Roger may not have found that other version of your contact us page, but if it's duplicate content, go ahead and redirect the duplicate URLs to the URL you prefer for that page.</my></my></my></my>

The reason you do this is to keep all the link juice you're getting for those pages consolidated in one place, so rather than having two pages with some link juice competing on the search result pages, you can have one page with all the link juice which will rank better.