I am auditing a Joomla website that uses the MightySites component to create multiple versions of the same site for different state/province areas. For example, the site structure looks something like:

example.com/fl/
example.com/mn/
example.com/ny/
example.com/wa/

etc.

Each of the state home pages are largely identical and much of the content within each state sub-folder is a copy of the original content on the main example.com site, with minor changes here and there. The client is a national organization and needs to keep this structure to allow each state to be able to edit and change their own content, though as far as I can see content doesn't actually vary much.

What's best practice here in reducing duplicate content issues? We can't use hreflang as it is all within one country (although it does also provide two different language versions of content, for which I will use hreflang.) Should we just canonical everything back to the corresponding pages on the example.com site?

Any thoughts or recommendations much appreciated.

Nice! (for speed at least)

I would show your team some examples of external URLs pointing at the non trailing slash versions of your pages and explain the downside of the 302 redirect. Also consider that people and bots visiting those URLs will be adding overhead to your server, and on Amazon that will equal increased cost (small as it may be, the pennies add up!)

Reading the link you provided it looks like the default behaviour of the page metadata redirect under the s3 console is to create a 301 redirect. That makes me think the 302 is coming from somewhere else. Look at the following URL:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsiteConfiguration.html

It looks like you can add advanced redirects under "Enable website hosting -> edit redirection rules". I'd explore if there are redirects listed there and maybe chat to your developers further.

While you are it I spotted two other issues for you to consider. Currently the index.html files in your directories resolve to the same page as your main directory. I would 301 those pages back to the parent directory (slash version). Or you could add canonical URLs pointing back to the parent directory (with trailing slash). I'd make a case for adding canonical URLs to all pages.

Also, you currently have a number of redirect chains e.g.

http://www.strutta.com/resources/posts/share-your-contests-and-sweepstakes-all-over-social-media 301 redirects to http://www.strutta.com/resources which 302 redirects to http://www.strutta.com/resources/.

You need to find the original redirect and change it to 301 redirect to the trailing slash version of the directory. Screaming Frog can help you find these redirect chains.

Hey Danny,

As Maximilian suggested above the best solution is going to be to change those 302s to 301s. I generally like to redirect to trailing slash URLs for directories and non trailing slash URLs for files/pages (that's that standard convention). I find in practice hardly anyone who links organically ever includes a trailing slash when linking to a page, but when it's the homepage I don't worry about it too much, browsers and Google can figure that out.

Basically you need to figure out where the 302 is coming from and hopefully it is in your .htaccess file. If you can edit your .htaccess file you need to change that to a 301 redirect, or you could remove the redirect and just use a canonical URL pointing at the / version of the page. I would prefer to go with the 301 though. Just be sure to look at how these redirects are being implemented and in what order, you don't want to end up with redirect chains either.

Can you get access to your .htaccess file or is the server running something funky?