Hey, as someone who is up against some of the hardest SEO verticals I've had a lot of experience making MySource work for search on the technical side of things. Today, I got an external evaluation of my technical SEO onsite and was told categorically that my CMS is causing duplicate content penalties due to the nature of how the site asset has two URLs.
Demonstration:
http://www.belushis.com/
http://www.belushis.com/home
Is there anyway I can fix this so that there is only one URL per site asset?
[quote]
Is there anyway I can fix this so that there is only one URL per site asset?
[/quote]
That is strange, because even none CMS sites could have this problem. If you are using just normal html, you could have:
www.mysite.com
www.mysite.com/index.html
Both would be the same page. Would they see that example as different?
First thing I said. Response was that Google recognizes these both as seperate directories:
http://www.belushis.com/
http://www.belushis.com/home
ie:
http://www.belushis.com/home/
Which is were the issue comes from.
[quote]
First thing I said. Response was that Google recognizes these both as seperate directories:
[/quote]
Hmm, interesting.
How did you get an SEO audit? I need to do this, and learn more about SEO.
[quote]
Hey, as someone who is up against some of the hardest SEO verticals I've had a lot of experience making MySource work for search on the technical side of things. Today, I got an external evaluation of my technical SEO onsite and was told categorically that my CMS is causing duplicate content penalties due to the nature of how the site asset has two URLs.
Demonstration:
http://www.belushis.com/
http://www.belushis.com/home
Is there anyway I can fix this so that there is only one URL per site asset?
[/quote]
If it is only home, then I would hard code it into the design as "/".
It has been my experience that some SEO companies do not not know what they are talking about. You know your site best and you can see what searches people are coming in on. Having relevant content is far more important than duplicates that may be caused by (for example) multiple catgorisation schema) IMHO.
The advice came from a company and people I really trust. They are not gaining anything from the advice as we do all the search work inhouse (so no contracts or anything like that which sometimes solicits poor advice). We hardcode the / into all the designs, however, if you use a site asset in any listing or navigation MySource produces the /home asset.
The point is Google recieves duplicate content for the most important webpage on any MySource site. Is there anyway to 301 /home to / ?
Nic, I'll send you a few really good e-books if you're interested? SEO is full of conflicting advice, but there are a few people I really trust and admire in the industry who I've followed and got good results.
[quote]
Nic, I'll send you a few really good e-books if you're interested? SEO is full of conflicting advice, but there are a few people I really trust and admire in the industry who I've followed and got good results.
[/quote]
Thanks, I would really appreciate it.
[quote]
The advice came from a company and people I really trust. They are not gaining anything from the advice as we do all the search work inhouse (so no contracts or anything like that which sometimes solicits poor advice). We hardcode the / into all the designs, however, if you use a site asset in any listing or navigation MySource produces the /home asset.
The point is Google recieves duplicate content for the most important webpage on any MySource site. Is there anyway to 301 /home to / ?
[/quote]
Cool.
You could added a 301 to apache, but this will be at a performance cost.
Why don't you use /home as the main address for home, and do a 301 from / to /home ?
I should add that we have the same issue, but don't have any problem with ranking - search for "new zealand radio" or pretty much any nz radio related search and we are first or near the top of the first page. Although we do have a unique property, so that helps.
cheers,
Richard
Richard, thanks for that. We don’t have a problem with ranking either. Sure we’re in a much more competitive space with agregators and afflicates with million pound budgets - but we hold our own. All it means is we have to make sure our site is 100% perfect technically so we can focus on off site search. I noticed you also have duplicate content in Google.
In the end of the day it’s all about off site right now, but would like to hear if the Squiz team have any solutions to this…
Why don't you just set the web path of the home page to index.html
The extension might make search engines treat it as a file instead of a directory.
[quote]
I noticed you also have duplicate content in Google.[/quote]
I’m only seeing one result from Google on that search. Richard, did you modify your site to produce that result since Duncan’s post? (And if so, how?)
[quote]
I'm only seeing one result from Google on that search. Richard, did you modify your site to produce that result since Duncan's post? (And if so, how?)
[/quote]
Well if I told you that I would have to shoot everyone who reads this thread.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Joke, Joke.
Actually I did not do anything.
I know what you could do - set up a robots.txt to tell google to not index /home .
That would work. They would not crawl /home or its variants, so the content would not end up in the index.
[quote]
Hey, as someone who is up against some of the hardest SEO verticals I've had a lot of experience making MySource work for search on the technical side of things. Today, I got an external evaluation of my technical SEO onsite and was told categorically that my CMS is causing duplicate content penalties due to the nature of how the site asset has two URLs.
Demonstration:
http://www.belushis.com/
http://www.belushis.com/home
Is there anyway I can fix this so that there is only one URL per site asset?
[/quote]
I can think of a few ways:
- dont fix it but remove the penalty
a. robots.txt
b. conditional canonical tag see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
- fix the issue - I had an idea that it might not be too much development work to make setting a home page optional and allow setting a paint layout on the site asset directly instead for people who dont mind the inconvenience of not actually having a home page asset.
I think 1b is the cleanest quick solution. ir add <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" /> conditionally if the URL has /home on; we should be able to do this by one means or another, will test which means works best.