Canonicalization issue? - URLs with and without trailing slashes showing up as unique
-
For some reason, our urls are set to change from “www.apprenda.com/ANYTHING" to “apprenda.com/ANYTHING”
These register as different pages though? We have rankings in SEOMoz Pro for terms where our homepage shows up 6th on google, but SEOMoz says it's not on the first page because it's checking against apprenda.com and not www.apprenda.com
Also, it seems like for some reason pages with trailing slashes also register differently than those without. Should we be doing something for that? Something to make sure all pages get rewritten to having the trailing slash or not?
For instance, this url: http://apprenda.com/saasgrid/features/multi-tenancy/ and this url” http://apprenda.com/saasgrid/features/multi-tenancy are really the same page. Yet in our analytics, they register as different pages with their own stats, etc.
What should we do in our particular case, and how can we get this fixed?
I really appreciate the help, and thanks in advance!
- Jesse
-
Here's a good post (here at SEOmoz) about the rel=canonical tag: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not
Here is a good resource for 301 redirects in other languages: http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
I don't have much experience with .NET but it looks like there are two ways to accomplish it. 1) Make changes to IIS to create the permanent redirect, 2) create server side code (maybe you have to check what URL is being requested and redirect them to the correct format?). You should be able to use REGEX like is displayed in my original post to accomplish this in .NET.
I would say the change directly in IIS, if you have access, is the way to go.
Jared
-
Awesome, thanks Jared! Our site is .NET based, but I believe their is a standard "index.aspx". Would this still apply?
Also, you mentioned that this, AS WELL AS utilizing canonical tags should take care of this. How should we go about utilizing canonical tags for our site?
Thanks again!
- Jesse
-
You should utilize htaccess 301 permanent redirects to force trailing slashes and www. to your URLs (or vice versa). This way you will let Google and other search engines know the correct way to be displaying your URLs. Anything pointing to your domain that doesn't fit that will be redirected to the proper format. This, as well as utilizing canonical tags, should take care of your duplicate content issue.
I'm assuming you have an index.php for your website but modify this and test as needed.
Externally redirect to add missing trailing slash to URLs with no filetype
RewriteCond $1 !(.[a-z0-9]{1,5}|/)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mywebsite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]Externally redirect non-blank non-canonical hostname request to canonical hostname
(if not already done by the above rule)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.mysite.com)?$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]Rewrite all requests which do not resolve to existing files to the CMS script, except
for image, css, and JS file requests, none of which need to be handled by the CMS,
and requests for index.php itself (to avoid a wasteful second-pass exists check).
RewriteCond $1 !(^index.php|.(gif|jpe?g|png|css|js))$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]Make sure you test this out before going live but it should work for what you need.
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
-
Post migration issues - #11 + configuration issue
Hello Moz community. I'm keen to find out your experiences on the following: Have you ever experienced a migration whereby a large % of keywords are stuck in position #11 - post migration? The keywords do not move up or down (whilst competitors jump from 13 to 9 and vice versa) over a three month period. Please see the % difference in the attached e-mail. (sample 1,000 keyword terms) Question: Has anyone ever experienced this type of phenomenon before? If so - what was the root cause of this and did this happen post migration? What solution did you use to rectify this? Have you ever seen a cross-indexing issue between two domains (each domain serves a different purpose) post migration, which impacts the performance of the main brand domain? I will explain a little further - say you have www.example.com (brand site) and www.example-help.com (customer service site) and the day the brand website is migrated (same domain - just different file structure), www.example-help.com points to the same server that www.example.com is on (with a different file structure) and starts to inherit the legacy file structure. For example, the following is implemented on migration day: I will explain a little further - say you have www.example.com (brand site) and www.example-help.com (customer service site) and the day the brand website is migrated (same domain - just different file structure), www.example-help.com points to the same server that www.example.com is on (with a different file structure) and starts to inherit the legacy file structure. For example, the following is implemented on migration day: For example, the following is implemented on migration day: www.example.com/fr/widgets-purple => 301s to www.example.com/fr/widgets/purple But www.example-help.com now points to the same server where the customer service content is now hosted. So although the following is rendered: So although the following is rendered correctly: www.example-help.com/how-can-we-help We also have the following indexed in Google.fr - competing for the same keyword terms and the main brand website has dropped in rankings: www.example-help.com/fr/widgets-purple [legacy content from main brand website] Even when legacy content is 301 redirected from www.example-help.com to www.example.com, the authority isn't passed across and we now have www.example.com (as per Q1) a lot lower in Google than pre-migration. Question: Have you ever experienced a cross-indexing issue like above whereby Google potentially isn't passing authority across from legacy to the new setup? I'm very keen to hear your experiences on these two subjects and whether you have had similar problems on some of your domains. E0hbb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMVSEO0 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
Is it best to have products and reviews on the same URL?
Hi Moz, Is it better to have products and reviews on the same or different URLs? I suspect that combining these into one page will help with rankings overall even though some ranking for product review terms may suffer. This is for a hair products company with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of reviews. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.0 -
Overly-Dynamic URL
Hi, We have over 5000 pages showing under Overly-Dynamic URL error Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like, http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3 Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there? like: Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y if not how far into the url should be disallowed? So far we have added the following to our robots,txt Disallow: /?sort=title Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y Disallow: /?sort=price Disallow: /?clearall=Y Just not sure if they are correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Kami
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dellamoda2 -
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash?
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash? www.example.com/services Or www.example.com/services**/** Does Google consider these to be the same link or does Google treat them as different links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
URL blocked
Hi there, I have recently noticed that we have a link from an authoritative website, however when I looked at the code, it looked like this: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="http://www.mydomain.com/" title="blocked::http://www.mydomain.com/">keyword</a> You will notice that in the code there is 'blocked::' What is this? has it the same effect as a nofollow tag? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Countries - Duplication Issues
Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which has been up and running for the past 5 years now and we have now decided because we have a big market in Ireland .ie we want to have a .ie website, the question is, is it ok just to replicate the .co.uk for the .ie website? Are there duplication issues? Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul781