SEO Improvements - Duplicate Content and Redirects

October 22 2012

By Chadwick Meyer

We're working on improving the native SEO performance of all websites that run on our platform. Search Engine Optimization recommendations change all the time as search engines improve their secret algorithms and we have to adapt to the new rules. But we are committed to making sure that we make SEO optimized websites.

Search engines do not like duplicate content. Unfortunately they aren't smart enough to know that it's just one page with different capitalization or with extra variables in the URL. Essentially if the URLs are different, it treats the webpage like two different pages. If search engines see two pages with nearly identical content they are going to think you are spamming, or if they see two pages with exactly the same content it will dilute the rank of that page.

So today we setup redirects to ensure that if a page is accessed with the same friendly url that has different capitalization, it will redirect to the correct friendly url (both still work, but it 301 redirects to the proper page so only one page gets indexed), e.g. /Latest-Products vs /latest-products will redirect to whichever you set as the real friendly URL.

We also made sure that if pages have extra variables on the end of the url, that do not cause the page to load different content, google will ignore those in it's index as well (we set a meta tag that tells robots not to index those "pages" since they are not distinct pages). So for example, if the URL is /Blog?leave_comment=1 that won't get indexed as a separate page. Or if the URL is /Blog/Archives?page=1 that also won't get indexed, since the /Blog/Archives defaults to page one already.

We've also improved some other system issues that used to allow pages to be accessed in several ways (for flexibility), but which are now considered bad for SEO. For example, previously you could access the blog via the ID (www.domain.com/1234), or Friendly URL (www.domain.com/My-Blog), or the generic content type (www.domain.com/blog/home). But now, all of these will redirect to the main blog page (www.domain.com/My-Blog).

And finally we also have the page display the blog tags as keywords, if you haven't set any custom keywords in the SEO Page Settings by default. You can still override the tags if you want, but for most people this will help immensely.

Tags : SEO, search engine optimization, duplicate content, redirects, improvements, websites

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