On Page Question - URL

Hello. Both these pages exist:

http://www.discountcruises.com/cruise-specials/?leadsourceid= and http://discountcruises.com/cruise-specials

Does this leadsource hurt us in terms of duplicate content? We need a leadsource id to track outside events such as PPC and other advertising. Please give a technical answer. I understand it's not ideal, but I noticed the homepage version of the leadsource did not get indexed, but only the clean form of the url has.

 

No duplicate content refers to the content on the page not the link. Also, much research has been done on duplicate content and even Matt Cutts of Google has indicated that the concerns over duplicate content are overrated.

mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/

 

Not what I was referring to

 

What were you referring to? As far as I can tell they're exactly the same but they will be modified depending on the leadsource parameter... the Google bot will most likely not have the leadsource parameter set unless there is a link to your site using the id from another page.

I guess it will depend how many links you have to the page including the lead source id... if it is more than the usual then it will be indexed and ranked accordingly...

Wordpress uses a parameter ?pageid=123 and all pages get indexed and ranked separately depending on how many links they have pointing to them

 

FlightCenter, you concern can be easily solved by using robots.txt directive: Disallow *?leadsourceid=
Check for correct format before deploying.

 

Hi,

It will have an affect, as rank is being shared between the two URLs. Having said that, if Google identifies that the content is the same, it will index and stick to just one.

I also notice you have:
http://www.discountcruises.com
http://discountcruises.com

Perhaps this was just a typing error?

If not, you could have four possible URLs for the page, as these also are treated as separate pages by the search engines. Ideally you should decide which one to use and 301 redirect from the other.

You can tell Google which of the two (with or without www) to use in SERPS, but I think it's cleaner to redirect.

 

Yes! they count to duplicate content and technically are called canonical URLs. Google Webmasters blog has a answer to this problem. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

 

Since the both urls contain the same content, this would create a duplicate content issue. There are few ways you can do to avoid this problem:

1) Use canonical tag: Add <link rel="canonical" href="http://discountcruises.com/cruise-specials"/> in your web page source code.
2) Use robots.txt to block the URLs with query strings. Use following code to instruct crawlers not to follow the first url:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

3) In your webmaster tool under setting tab, you can mention the parameters in your URLs that you do not want to get indexed