Have Duplicate Content & Indexing Issues? Fixing Your URL Structure
Many large websites (especially e-commerce based) run into the issue of duplicate content. Search engines are not a fan of duplicate content and avoid indexing any page that they believe is duplicate content. At times the solution can be as easy as fixing the Navigation menus. Navigation menus must not be programmed in Flash or JavaScript as the search engines have a hard time spidering these. For the rest of us, duplicate content can probably be avoided by following the following tips.
Do you know how many URL variations you have?
How many domains do you own? if your website shows up under several URL's how does the search engine know which one to index? Most of the time it will index whichever URL it visits first. It's important that you 301 redirect all the domains that you have to one. Make sure your using a 301 redirect and not a 302 as the search engines will view a 302 as duplicate content still.
How many domain extension are you using?
Does your non www version and www version of your website work? How about /index or /default? these are all considered duplicate content to the search engines. Use a 301 redirect for these or consider using a canonical tag to avoid this duplicated content.
Using SEO friendly URL's?
Dynamic URL's can be really ugly, would you rather see a domain like domain.com/folder/?ID=382 or would you rather see domain.com/red/water-hydrants? URL re-writes can be used to transform these ugly dynamic URL's to nice and clean static URL's.
Fixing URL structure isn't always a save-all
A lot of the time URL structure is the culprit in creating duplicated content. However, there are several other factors that can cause these issues too. If this is your case, check out your robots.txt file and make sure its set up properly. Another option is to see if your XML site map is set up properly as well.
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