5 replies to this topic

[EricCantona]

Hi Folks,

Thanks again for your help so far.

Having a bit of trouble with something I hope you can help me out.


The CMS we use creates two versions of every page which is really annoying. For Product A for example we get:

(1) www.website.com/producta/

and

(2) www.website.com/website.com/producta/

Both these pages have the same content title tags etc.

I have just used a program to crawl our site and to my horror there are quite a number of pages throughout our site which link to the version 2 style pages, which is not what we want.My concern here is that the search engines think we have duplicate content.

I want to go through our site and make sure that we only link to pages that end in /producta/ and not /website.com/producta/

I intend on fixing all these links to the one version on our redesigned site (underway at the moment), so that when it goes live there will be no duplicate pages.

Is this a wise idea to do all at once or will it raise a flag with Google?

Surely elimating these duplicates is a positive thing?

[Michael Martinez]

I am guessing you're using relative links (such as "/", "/folder", "/index.htm", "page.htm", etc.) rather than absolute links (starting with "http" and including your domain name) for your internal navigation.

If that is the case, switching to absolute links may help you fix the problem, although that really depends on how the CMS works.

[chrishirst]

The only time it really matters about "duplicate content" is for incoming links,

vbulletin creates several versions of any one page with "print" and "lofi" versions etc. It doesn't harm the huge number of forums using vB. Invision does the same and it's made no difference here

It really isn't that much of a problem as something like URL session IDs which can create duplicates ad infinitum.

Fix it if you can, but if you can't, it's not a major catastrophe simply block the paths you don't want crawling with robots.txt.

[Jill]

I would definitely point all the links to the correct URLs. It's fine to do it all at once, and the sooner the better.

Then go to your robots.txt file and disallow:

/website.com/

[JeremyH]

You might even consider, after fixing your internal links, creating a .htaccess rule that 301 redirects traffic from /website/producta/.* to /producta/$1

[EricCantona]

Thanks very much folks.

I met with our CMS provider today, and they are able to remove the second version of the pages.

Before this happens I will make sure redirect(s) are in place on all the /website.com/producta/ pages.

In the meantime im gonna make sure all the internal links are correct.

Thanks Folks.

Kind Regards,

EC