avoid full News urls appearing in search engines

[echobrin]

We're using the URL (slug) field to enter URLs for all of our News articles, but sometimes the default URL for an article still shows up in Google search results. Is there a way to prevent this?

[DIGI3]

Ideally you'd want to find where the links are being indexed from and see if you can change those to make sure they use the slug url. A bit of detective work might be needed.

As a less ideal workaround, you might be able to block them in your robots.txt file if the path is unique to the system urls, e.g. /news/, and isn't part of the slug urls. Another option is you could also do a check in your news detail template to compare the url visited with the slug url, and if they don't match add a noindex tag.

[Rolf]

Use (install) Canonical URL's, that is what they are for to prevent double indexed URLs
That and more is described in this blog:
https://cmscanbesimple.org/blog/base-cm ... d-metatags

If you want to go a step further you can also use this one:
https://cmscanbesimple.org/blog/redirec ... onical-url

[echobrin]

Thank you both for your replies. It looks like I have some work to do. I do have canonical urls set up but it must not be quite right. I'll take a look at the links provided.

[Rolf]

Google isn't flawless either, so........