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I think it generally depends on the cause of the duplicate. If its system issue then you'll forever be creating 301s for your urls. In that case its best to avoid having to do the 301 and stick with canonical. With canonical are telling the search engine to only index one version of the url.
Both 301 and canonical have their uses but the choice should depend on the issue and what you are trying to achieve. Hope this helps?
Duke
Hi Joao,
I think you probably need to establish if the those two urls came about due to a cms or system issue. I ask this because some cms system create duplicate/different urls for the same page and the good ones have a canonical set up to avoid duplicate content. If it is a system or cms issue then get a canonical set up. Use screeming frog to run a crawl to see if i picks up any duplicate urls. Currently, your homepage runs the risk of duplicate content penalty.
If its not a system wide issue, then set up a 301 redirect. Think of the home page that people will remember easily and can share on social media platforms without part of it being cut of due to length.
All the best
Duke
I haven't come across any research that suggests any difference between post and pages.I think it boils that to the type of content you will be publishing and what you intend to achieve. Since it's solely a blog that you are creating, i will suggest you stick with posts. That allows for visitors to comment etc. If that is not important then you can stick to pages.
I think you are taking my comments out of context. I said "You need to look at it from the context of your overall links". This is about having a natural link profile. This can be variety of link sources, link quality profile, Moz rank variation of your link sources etc. If the 120 links you got from the great blog posts at SEOmoz only contributes to a small percentage of your total links then you should be alright. If it however contributes to +80% of all your links then that is a warning sign.
I don't think a couple of links from the same domain is going to hurt you. If it becomes too many then it loses it natural value. You need to look at it from the context of your overall links. If you have 200 links and 100 of them is coming from about 5 -10 domains then you have a problem. Link source diversity and anchor text variation is important
It looks like you might not have anything to worry about then. pick an example of that url with ?zxxxxx. look at the page source (in firefox, go to tools, web developer, then page source) look for "rel=canonical". if the url indicated there is your homepage then you have nothing to worry about. after a few crawls, Google will know that the url is the same as the home and will remove those urls from the index.
Ok. have a look at the page source and see what canonical is shows. if its pointing to the current homepage then leave it for a while. Google will catch up with and remove it from the index. if not the post a full url here so i can take a look for you.
Are these urls currently leading to a 404 page? if they are then follow these steps
Hope this helps
Why don't you go with a subdomain and have the appropriate rel="alternate" hereflang= set up?
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It depends on the type of system you used to create your website. Speak to your developers and they can create a rule in your htaccess file that will redirect all urls with /?.
Before you do that you need to establish why you want to redirect them and how those urls were created in the first place. understanding how they came about might unearth a cms related issue which can be better address with canonical, webmaster tools url paremeters or other techniques of avoiding duplicate content.
Hi Joao,
I think you probably need to establish if the those two urls came about due to a cms or system issue. I ask this because some cms system create duplicate/different urls for the same page and the good ones have a canonical set up to avoid duplicate content. If it is a system or cms issue then get a canonical set up. Use screeming frog to run a crawl to see if i picks up any duplicate urls. Currently, your homepage runs the risk of duplicate content penalty.
If its not a system wide issue, then set up a 301 redirect. Think of the home page that people will remember easily and can share on social media platforms without part of it being cut of due to length.
All the best
Duke
Firstly, i'm dead certain that if those directories didn't add any value, Google would have dealt with them because they are well known directories. The fact that they are still there means Google and its Panda/Penguin family sees value in them. We can argue all day about it but that won't change it.
Secondly the payment you make to these directories is not for your inclusion, rather for an editorial review. Two different things.
A link can be viewed as paid depending on the angle from which you are looking at it. Someone can argue that giving a blogger a product to write a review post about it, in a wayi is paid.
I think you are taking my comments out of context. I said "You need to look at it from the context of your overall links". This is about having a natural link profile. This can be variety of link sources, link quality profile, Moz rank variation of your link sources etc. If the 120 links you got from the great blog posts at SEOmoz only contributes to a small percentage of your total links then you should be alright. If it however contributes to +80% of all your links then that is a warning sign.
Why don't you go with a subdomain and have the appropriate rel="alternate" hereflang= set up?
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It might be worth fleshing your question out a little. What ration are you referring to? See Rand's WBF on avoiding link based penalty http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday
It appears that you have some technical issues with your website. I could be wrong but i suspect your CMS or whatever system youre using generates two different urls for the same page there are no canonicals set up. Before you dive in and set up 301s, i suggest you or your developers delve into your url creation and establish why you have two different urls for them same page. If its a system issue then get them to set up a canonical of one url to the other. Dr. Pete's post on duplicate content will provide more insight to that.
I also spotted a few other techincal issues. You need to look at your 404 page as well. see examples below
http://www.ferringway.com/local-venues/index.php
http://www.ferringway.com/durango-activitiesss.php
All the best.
I think it generally depends on the cause of the duplicate. If its system issue then you'll forever be creating 301s for your urls. In that case its best to avoid having to do the 301 and stick with canonical. With canonical are telling the search engine to only index one version of the url.
Both 301 and canonical have their uses but the choice should depend on the issue and what you are trying to achieve. Hope this helps?
Duke
I would suggest you stay well clear of them. They are similar to those companies offering you cheap links. The long effect on your website will be painful. To be honest, I would question anyone who claims can automate link removal. The process of removing links is a long and painful process which requires human to do it. There are bits of the process that can be automated but the final decision on which links to remove can't.
Take a look at this Q&A for some useful steps http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links
Other tools that might be useful are
http://www.outreachr.com/bulk-domain-checker/
http://net-peak.com/software/netpeak-checker/
All the best
1/21/2013 When the Disavow tool was announced by Matt Cutts at Pubcon, this year, there was an uproar of mixed reactions for SEOs across the digital world. Some had a good feeling about and others had their doubts about the real reason behind the introduction, even though Bing has had a similar tool in existence for a while.