Is this duplicate content?

[ATMOSMarketing56]

My client has several articles and pages that have 2 different URLs

For example:

/bc-blazes-construction-trail

is the same article as:

/article.cfm?intDocID=22572

I was not sure if this was duplicate content or not ...

Or if I should be putting "/article.cfm" into the robots.txt file or not..

if anyone could help me out, that would be awesome!

Thanks

[PeteGregory]

That would definitely be considered duplicate content.  There are a few things you can do to fix it, but rather than wasting a bunch of time writing it out here I would recommend visiting the link below for more detailed info:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

[kchan]

Hello,

It sure is duplicate content.  By putting "/article.cfm" into the robot.txt won't work because if you do that you are just re-directing the whole folder.  You need to do a permanent re-direct.  I had a brief look at the site and it seems like there are over 1000+ pages.  This might take a while but it is neccessary to do it, if not your clients rankings will not perform and most likely penalised.  A simple way would be doing a canonical link in /article.cfm?intDocID=22572 so you are showing google the main article is located at /bc-blazes-construction-trail.

However, the best way would be doing a 301 permanent re-direct of course.  I'm sure you could get a web dev to write a script to automatically run through the database and output the re-directs than manually re-directing 1000+ pages.  If it can't be done, you could outsource it on freelancer.com for around $2-300.

Thanks

[ATMOSMarketing56]

Any chance you can spend a little time writing it out?

My guess is that we should be doing a rel canonical tag on all the article.cfm?intDocID=22572 type pages, that would then direct the bots to our /bc-blazes-construction-trail. But what's the easiest way to do that across the whole site?

[ATMOSMarketing56]

Awesome Chan, thanks. That was my thought as well. Most difficult part will be determining how to get that script in place.

[StickyRiceSEO]

I mostly agree with kchan.

• It is considered duplicate content.
• Simplest way is to do rel canonical for the pages with ids.

However, I suspect 301 redirect is not the best way. Especially, if your website is using Omniture and/or Google web analytics code, you might get miscalculated traffic through them because of 301 redirect.

Be careful if you choose the last route.

[loopyal]

ATMOS, those are just the same page, so Canonical tag should do it, but also you want to stop google indexing it, so you could detect that it is called with the article.cfm and use a no index META tag too, but not if it uses the friendly url

[Dr-Pete]

Agreed - although I think a 301-redirect or canonical tag implementation would probabyl be ok. If there's a database lookup that can translate the DocID into a URL string, the canonical is easy (I write some CF code, so I can at least tell you it's doable). Keep in mind that "article.cfm" is only one template, so if you can find a solution that's data-driven, it's just as easy for 1,000 pages as it is for 10.

You could also create a dynamic 301-redirect via <cfheader>- the core logic is the same. Basically, you look up the URL from the DocID and dynamically create the tag. You just need someone who understands your CMS and data. The actual code is only a few lines, but understanding your setup is the time-consuming part.</cfheader>