Caninical issue

[MPO]

Hello all,

I have a problem related to "canonical issues" that I would like to get your view on:

The issue:

Our site: http://www.texaspoker.dk/ has a "canonical issue" with the home page.

We added a redirect to www.texaspoker.dk, but this hasn't solved our problem.

In the latest "too many on page links" analysis made with SEOmoz' exelent SEO tool, we get the following error:

http://www.texaspoker.dk(101 on page links)

http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 (on page links)

So, made simple, the analysis tells us that both http://www.texaspoker.dk and http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 has too many on page links. How do I eliminate / remove the unwanted http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 and how did it, in the first place, get there?

Thanks a lot!

[ClickConsult]

Hi there,

Firstly, I think it's important to note that the tool isn't telling you that the site has canonical issues. Canonical issues are basically when you can view the same page from more than one version of the URL.

The "too many links" issue is, as it suggests, the page has too many links.

At the moment the homepage (http://www.texaspoker.dk/) has 102 links, which is acceptable however you should look at removing any unnecassary links on-page. Generally, you should look at having few than 100 links on a page. Having 102 is fine but obviously if you can remove unnecessary links, do it.

The fewer links on the page the better

Hope that helps/clears things up!

[MPO]

Hi SEOConsult,

Thanks a lot for the answer. I will try to get some of the links removed, as they are not all "necessary."

This being said, I still believe that it's a problem for my site that there are access to two different homepages (?):

http://www.texaspoker.dk

and:

http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2

Thanks a lot, all suggestions are very much appreciated.

[ClickConsult]

You're correct, that is a canonical issue. I'd suggest that you 301 redirect ?page=2 back to the root.

Good luck!

[MPO]

Hi again,

Thanks for your advice - the thing is that this is what I have already tried. The problem here is that the site apparently allows one to write: http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=3
http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=4
etc.

Do you - or anybody else - have an idea how I can stop this?

Thanks a lot, your advice is very much appreciated.

[ClickConsult]

No problem Do you have a .htaccess file within the root directory? If not, create a new .htaccess file and add this rule:

RewriteRule ^page?=(.*)$ / [L,R=301]

I'd suggest that you add a canonical tag to all pages too.

[MPO]

Hi again,

Thanks a lot for your answer and the solution to fix the problem on the front page.

We use Nginx as web server software but we can setup the .htaccess stuff in the .conf file. However we have other paginated pages on our site. Will the above mentioned solution affect all paginated pages on our site?

[MPO]

Hi @SEOConsult,

Will the .htaccess fix you mentioned affect other paginated pages on our site?

[MPO]

Hi again,

I managed to fix it for the frontpage using the folowing PHP code:

if(isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])){

$get_uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

if($get_uri!="/"){ $url = "/"; header('Location: ' . $url, true, 301);

}

}

?>