Duplicate Content Issues - Fixing Your URL Structure

Duplicate content and site indexation is an issue that many large websites (specifically e-commerce web developed sites) have to deal with. Sometimes the solutions is within the navigation menus. Is the navigation programmed in flash or JavaScript? Maybe it's as simple as you forgot to link to all th pages throughout the menus. Fortunately for these sites, minimal navigation changes can be made to solve these issues. For other sites it can be more challenging. here are a coupld common URL structural issues that many large sites run into.

How Many Variations Of Your Site Are Out There?

How many domain names do you own? Can you access your website by typing in several completely different URL's? Having your website available at http://www.waycoolwebsite.com and http://www.coolwebsite.com can cause a problem. Google sees that the content is identical on these two URL's and at times will choose to only index one. Another issue with this is that your link equity is divided by two. If someone links to waycoolwebsite.com and someone else links to coolwebsite.com you only get 50% link equity when you should be getting it all.

The solution to this is to include a 301 redirect to the website of your choice. Do you prefer to use coolwebsite.com as your primary domain? Then include a 301 redirect from waycoolwebsite.com to coolwebsite.com. Remember that only a 301 redirect will forward the links from one website to another. With this redirect in tact, you now have 100% link equity in one website.

How Many URL extensions for each page do you have?

Now that you have chosen your domain, do you know how many URL extensions that site has? Do both the www and non www version of your website work? How about the extension /default.html or /index.html? All these URL's are considered duplicate content to the search engines.

Lucky for us the search engines honor a simple "tag" that can be added to a sites source code. This tag is referred to as a "Canonicalization tag". What this tag does is it tells the search engines what the preferred URL of that specific page is. So when the search engines visit http://www.coolwebsite.com/index.html they see that the real site you want them to include in the index is http://www.coolwebsite.com. (or whatever URL you place within the canonical tag.

Do You Use Search Engine Friendly URL's?

It's very common that e-commerce websites use technology such as Ektron CMS to build content pages. The issue is that they generate some very long and parameter filled URL's. Search engines don't have as many issues these days indexing these sites but why do you want them to work harder than they have to? Consider using URL re-writing on your site. Tell me, which of the two URL's would you say looks better?

http://www.waycoolsite.com/folder/32?=345&p0:=2
or
http://www.waycoolsite.com/cool-template-ideas.html

The choice seems pretty obvious; the extra benefit to using URL re-writes is that you can include keywords in your URL. As you noticed in the second URL I added cool-template-ideas.html. In this case it's possible that "Cool template ideas" is one of my pages keywords.

URL Structure Is Not Always The Cause

Even though URL structure typically plays a role with indexing and duplicate content issues, it's not always the case. As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, navigation menus can be an issue as well as sitemaps, robots.txt files and unfortunately much more.

Are you looking for a search friendly e-commerce web design? Contact a member of the Minneapolis web design firm DKS Systems.