Two Versions Of Same Url?

Discussion in 'PHP' started by Jin, Jul 29, 2010.

  1. #1
    Hello, iam noticing a lot of duplicate meta title errors in webmaster consoles.

    Iam wondering why google is indexing both domain.com/Green-city-widget.html and domain.com/green-city-widget.html seperately?
     
    Jin, Jul 29, 2010 IP
  2. mjewel

    mjewel Prominent Member

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    #2
    Check your menu link structure. It shouldn't be happening unless those different versions of the link appears on your site. Use Xenu if you have a lot of pages.
     
    mjewel, Jul 29, 2010 IP
  3. Deacalion

    Deacalion Peon

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    #3
    Caps don't matter, they will both be considered the same. What could be messing you around is www.
    If the same page can be accessed from two different URLS (it's worse if you have links to both these urls) you have some problems.

    Google will see these as different pages:

    Click here to read this post by Matt Cutts.
     
    Deacalion, Jul 29, 2010 IP
  4. andymoo

    andymoo Peon

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    #4
    You must be linking to two urls, which is the right one? Capitals at the start or lower case? Whichever, decide then make a server side 301 manage the duplixation for you.
     
    andymoo, Jul 29, 2010 IP
  5. Jin

    Jin Well-Known Member

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    #5
    Thanks mate, i have read that long ago, single version of domain on most of my sites. And yea, google hsould not be indexing Caps and Non Caps seperately. Let me show you what i mean.
    Click Here


    Yea i might be linking to two sets of urls, i should probably need to figure out how it is linking to two sets. BTW check the link i meantioned above.
     
    Jin, Jul 29, 2010 IP
  6. dontkillme

    dontkillme Well-Known Member

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    #6
    that its very possible, lower case and uper case its seperated in Apache or other kind of Web Servers
     
    dontkillme, Jul 29, 2010 IP
  7. Deacalion

    Deacalion Peon

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    #7
    Ahh... for some reason I was thinking about the domain name (even though you put it clearly in your post) - this is always case insensitive. Directories and files are not.

    A solution to fix all the current duplicate pages would be to 301 them all to the one you want to rank. You could also use the canonical tag method.
    So the one you want to mark as a copy to the search engines would have this tag in the header:
    
    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/Green-city-widget.html" />
    
    HTML:
    This will make the search engines redirect all the relevant metrics (page rank, authority etc.) to what ever page is in the tag (href="here.."). That one being the original.

    For all other future pages, you might consider running the generated urls through strtolower().
     
    Deacalion, Jul 29, 2010 IP