SEO - eliminating duplicate URLs

CMS > SEO
1

I have a site that I’ll be migrating over to Treepl soon from BC. The site owner has an SEO team and on every review they recommend redirecting various duplicate URLs.

For example they want none all foldered content to appear in search engines as domain.com/folder (no trailing slash), and not domain.com/folder/ or domain.com/folder/index.html

In BC creating redirects for either of these case create an infinite redirect loop as BC treats these all as the same content with mulitple URLs.

I tested and redirecting from domain.com/folder/index.html to domain.com/folder/ works in Treepl as they are two distinct entities in this CMS.

Has anybody had any luck dealing with having domain.com/folder/ (trailing slash) resolve/redirect to domain.com/folder (no trialing slash)?

Is it possible to get one of the Treepl devs add somethign to the .htaccess for your site to deal with this or is there another workaround?

Are there other duplicate content gotchas that I should know about?

(PS. I know about canonical links… but according to this SEO team that isn’t sufficient on it’s own… they are always looking for me to create 301 redirects to address this issue)

2

Hi @Alex_B_Centrifuge you don’t need to redirect duplicate urls. You can either just disable them from search engines (have a no-index on them) or just leave them as-is. Google just won’t display duplicates in search engines and if you put in a canonical that should resolve it fairly well.

You definitely need to redirect any urls that were in the old site and not in the new site so that should be quite straight forward - not had any issues redirecting folders.

You can also disable folders from search engines which will put a no index on it, then can have the data all display just on a page. For example, disable ‘/folder/’ and create a page ‘/folder’ and then it resolves the issue. Then all the data within a folder can still be viewed separately ie. ‘/folder/page’.

I hope that helps.

3

Thanks @SiroccoDigital
If I have a folder named domain.com/folder/ , I get a duplicate name warning if I try to make a page named domian.com/folder . Is there a way around this?

4

@Alex_B_Centrifuge yes I can see that is happening. I have tested putting in a redirect of the trailing slash to non-trailing slash and that does work. Interestingly, I can’t get a ‘folder’ to automatically list in the sitemap so it is hard to see how the system is actually dealing with these files on the sitemap. That being the case, if you use the url structure /folder for all your navigation then the /folder/ shouldn’t be an issue.

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