3 Different Home Page URL's Being Indexed?
-
Hello Everyone!
I own a dog supplies eCom site on the x-cart platform. I recently upgraded to 4.4 version about 3 weeks ago and am noticing 3 different home page URL's getting indexed and ranked:
/
/home.php
/home.php?cat=I dont know why this is happening and I dont claim to be an expert SEO but know this cant be good! I am seeing high rankings on certain terms for all 3 URL's. Has anyone seen this before and can anyone give me any feedback on this and how it may be effecting my sites ranking in the future?
Thanks in advance!
Byron- -
I'm not a dev. Personally I stay at least ten feet away from any code when possible
I'll respond to the site form rather than here regarding SEO services... no longer an independent consultant...
-
Good stuff! Thanks again, Bevelwise!!
-
Thanks again Alan. i will send this to my dev. and see if he can do what you say. If not, do you do this sort of thing? Actually, I just spent most of my budget (and then some!) on the new site but will need an SEO to take a look at it soon.
I actually went to your site and filled out the form as I am interested in more backlinks
-
Duplicate content is never a good thing and can be handled a number of different ways. In this case I would do a number of things to make sure you are not causing confusion and ultimately segmenting out the link profile between multiple url's. I would
- 301 redirect /home.php to /
- Install a canonical tag on the home page
- If you don't already have your Google webmaster tools registered go do that, and then under site configuration use parameter handling tell Google to ignore the query string parameter ?cat= and set that to ignore.
Even though you are getting multiple versions of your home page ranked, are they for different keywords? I believe that if you fixed the duplicate content issues you would retain your rankings with your consolidated home page.
-
while you may be seeing a short-term advantage to leaving all versions untouched, having multiple versions of any individual URL indexed ultimately causes long term confusion and degradation to the site's overall SEO.
In X-Cart, you can either use an SEO redirect plug-in or have a custom .htaccess file created to resolve this. Either one requires a proper understanding of SEO, specific to this type of ecommerce system.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is the best use of canonical ref on home (default/index) page?
Moz reports show duplicate content for my www.domain.com and www.domain.com/default.html How do I format the canonical ref to put on the default.html page?
On-Page Optimization | | bhsiao0 -
'Results pages'
Hey there, I have a website that my client is update it every day with some 'results' for example - see attached image.
On-Page Optimization | | JohnPalmer
What is the best way to avoid 7 duplicate content pages every day? MgYlqFW.png0 -
Does a / at the end of a URL create a duplicate page?
Hello, I have just used (the amazing) Screaming Frog to check my site and it is listing the two following pages as having duplicate titles, making me think it is seeing them as duplicate pages. http://zenplugs.com/zenplugs-molded-earphones/ http://zenplugs.com/zenplugs-molded-earphones Do I need to redirect one of these? Thanks in advance! Toby
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
Home page cannibal
I was wondering if others had the same problem I have. It appears Google loves that home page too much and I'm having a difficult time getting it to rank the page I really want. And that happens if a keyword I want to rank for only appears on the home page one time with a keyword density of .1%. Take vanillaqueen.com for example. The home page ranks on the first page for "bulk vanilla beans" and not http://vanillaqueen.com/shop/category/vanilla-beans/ or http://vanillaqueen.com/five-reasons-why-buying-bulk-vanilla-makes-good-sense/ And I'll add another one that I recently took on. This is a personal injury attorney in a large city so there is a ton of competition who have been doing SEO for a very long time. (Fortunately he also does business and civil litigation law to keep the business going). Last month, according to webmaster tools, he got a couple of clicks (hey, it's something!) on "personal injury attorney [his city]" on page 2 in the SERPS, but it was his home page. http://bit.ly/1Gvumlm **In this case I don't mind people landing on the home page, but does the fact that another page that is much better optimized for those keywords indicate a penalty on that page? And is his rank lower because the better page is not ranking and Google has to find the next best thing in the home page? ** Has anyone else experienced that and what have you done to get Google to not go home? P.S. The law site is a huge challenge because of the competition. Any help you pros out there can offer to get this underdog out of hiding will be much appreciated. We're starting a smart, strategic content marketing plan now that I'm very excited about.
On-Page Optimization | | katandmouse1 -
My site's articles seem to never show up in Google.
This is in regards to a previous post that was answered for me:
On-Page Optimization | | Ctrl-Alt-Success
http://moz.com/community/q/my-site-s-name-not-ranking-in-google I was talking to a friend and he suggested I try to type in an article in google with the exact name followed by my site's domain name without the .com For example, I have an article entitled: "MULTITASKING IS BAD FOR YOU, MKAY?" Obviously it's a title most would not word in that way. I typed it in and followed it up with my site's domain minus .com. So "MULTITASKING IS BAD FOR YOU, MKAY? ctrl-alt-success" But I'm not even getting listed in the search. There's got to be something I'm missing. I understand backlinks are important for ranking, but when I'm trying to find an exact match along with my site's url minus the .com? I just have this strong hunch that something is awry. NOTE: It seems this is only with google. If I use Bing or Yahoo, it comes up just fine.0 -
Duplicate Content for Men's and Women's Version of Site
So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage. The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages. While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page? Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary? My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely? Hope this makes sense, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Home Page Content
Hello. i'm optimizing this website, > home page for one keyword phrase and i was wondering how many words article do i need with that keyword?and if i need it at all? as you can see if i add some content on my home page before the slider, it will ruin the look of the website, What is the right way to do it? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | KentR0 -
Google's view on geolocated results
Hello everyone, I am working on a project so the website is not online at the moment. My question is about Google's view on geolocated results : on the mainpage of the website, a bloc will be displaying local classifieds according to where the visitor is located. What will be Google's view on this bloc as it has no location ? A white empty bloc ? Bonus question : do you have any experience regarding this kind of situation ? How do you best deal with it in your opinion ? Thanks for your help ! Best Regards, Raphael
On-Page Optimization | | Pureshore0