Pretty URLs = Duplicate Content

1

It is my understanding the pretty URLs don’t add anything in terms of duplicating content. However, recently I am seeing duplicate pages on a number of sites i.e.

  • my website.com and
  • my website.com/index.php
    These are definitely being seen as duplicate pages because the title tags and meta descriptions are all coming up as duplicates. Plus, type the two URLs in and they come up the same under the two URLs.

Is it best to use a 301 redirect to resolve this? Will be a pain doing this over 100’s of pages.

1 Like
2

There should be no where a link on your page pointing to website.com/index.php. Do you know of such a link somewhere?

3

No this link doesn’t exist on the site(s) but as far as Google is concerned they show as duplicate pages.

4

This is what the canonical URL meta tag is for. I am pretty sure you are an SEO Helper user. It supports this tag for you. It makes it easy to automate in a partial as well

1 Like
5

@joeworkman do you have tutorials for this?

6

There are videos on the product page. But it’s easy. Either use the SEO Basics stack or the canonical url meta stack. And you are done. Just having that in the page should cover 99.9% of the use cases.

7

and this would be better than a 301 redirect?

8

Yes. It’s better. You don’t have duplicate content. The web server assumes an index page when it’s not provided.

With that said, I guess a redirect could work. But then you would have to create rules for every page in the site.

9

That’s the explanation I was looking for! Thanks Joe. I’ll be implementing this.