redirecting duplicate urls

jbob · 02-19-2008, 07:02 AM

I have multiple urls pointing to same product page on my ecommerce site because they are listed under multiple categories. I believe this is a common problem with dynamic sites.

I have read that 301 redirects from the non-canonical url to the canonical url is the best way to go. However wont this confuse both users and googlebot in terms of where they are in the sites navigation i.e breadcrumbs will be wrong for redirected pages.

It seems the only other way to go about it would be to block the non-canonical pages with noindex and robots.txt but then i would lose their Page Rank juice.

I probably havent explained this very well, but would anyone like to comment on my problem? I would love a second (or third) opinion.
Thank you
Jbob

**Rankenstein** · 02-21-2008, 02:41 AM

Do you mean you have the same product listed in multiple categories/urls?

jbob · 02-21-2008, 02:43 AM

yes thats right, sometimes a product may be in several categories so there are many urls pointing to exactly the same product page.

**Rankenstein** · 02-21-2008, 03:27 AM

OK, one product on several separate pages, yes it does happen quite regularly that way - using chairs as an example, one could be under leather chairs, and recliner chairs and have two different urls for that.

Without knowing the site, canonical urls and products specifically I can't offer more than that, other than to say, yes, at first glance 301s are the way to go if you really don't want duplicate pages on your site - you could always leave things as they are, and optimise the one page for 'recliner chair', and the other page for 'leather chair' and differ the content - but I'd consider that to be spammy and I don't think you want that. One page, one chair would make much more sense.

Googlebot wouldn't be confused by this. Customers might possibly, but if they click on a link to look at a leather chair, and arrive at a page about the leather chair they wanted to look at, I don't see any problem at all.

e_marketing_india · 02-24-2008, 02:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbob

I have multiple urls pointing to same product page on my ecommerce site because they are listed under multiple categories. I believe this is a common problem with dynamic sites.

I have read that 301 redirects from the non-canonical url to the canonical url is the best way to go. However wont this confuse both users and googlebot in terms of where they are in the sites navigation i.e breadcrumbs will be wrong for redirected pages.

It seems the only other way to go about it would be to block the non-canonical pages with noindex and robots.txt but then i would lose their Page Rank juice.

I probably havent explained this very well, but would anyone like to comment on my problem? I would love a second (or third) opinion.
Thank you
Jbob

As per your questions, you pages as as below :-

a . html
b . html
c . html
d . html

all having same content, and displaying same product.

This should be avoided in order to ward-off duplicate content filter of google. It could slightly lower your rankings for a particular product page which has influx of several different urls pointing to it.