[SOLVED] Pretty URLs can result in duplicate content
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 11:18 pm
Firstly, CMS Made Simple appears to be a great product. I've never tried a CMS package before, but I'm looking at them for one of my sites. WordPress and Drupal are o.k., but both have some inflexible issues I don't want to deal with.
Now, on to why I'm posting. I'm speaking strictly in terms of SEO here. Example:
http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/fdsa/downloads (which does not exist) gets to the same page as http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/downloads
This is not good in the eyes of most search engines. Now there is no real reason a search engine or person should ever hit those non-existent URLs as they shouldn't be linked from anything, but it extra stuff that needs to be taken into consideration for site management.
I want my site organized like so:
www.example.com/
www.example.com/category/
www.example.com/category/product-blurb/
www.example.com/category/product-blurb/detail/
If someone doesn't get to the right URL I want to send them a 404 error and I want to be able to see this error in my weblogs (or in my CMS package if it's got some reporting functionality). I don't want people to accidentally get to the right page from a bad link just as long as the last part of the URL is correct. A search engine will start indexing that and see the same content at two pages and ding you for duplicate content.
BTW, hope you have rel="nofollow" being attached to all links otherwise Google will see those two example links as duplicate content.
Now, on to why I'm posting. I'm speaking strictly in terms of SEO here. Example:
http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/fdsa/downloads (which does not exist) gets to the same page as http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/downloads
This is not good in the eyes of most search engines. Now there is no real reason a search engine or person should ever hit those non-existent URLs as they shouldn't be linked from anything, but it extra stuff that needs to be taken into consideration for site management.
I want my site organized like so:
www.example.com/
www.example.com/category/
www.example.com/category/product-blurb/
www.example.com/category/product-blurb/detail/
If someone doesn't get to the right URL I want to send them a 404 error and I want to be able to see this error in my weblogs (or in my CMS package if it's got some reporting functionality). I don't want people to accidentally get to the right page from a bad link just as long as the last part of the URL is correct. A search engine will start indexing that and see the same content at two pages and ding you for duplicate content.
BTW, hope you have rel="nofollow" being attached to all links otherwise Google will see those two example links as duplicate content.