URL rewriting causing problems

[ocelot]

Hi

I am having problems with my URL rewriting to create seo friendly / user friendly URL's.  I hope you follow me as I try to explain what is happening...

Since the creation of my rewrite rule I am getting lots of errors in my SEOMOZ report and Google WMT reports due to duplicate content, titles, description etc

For example for a product detail, it takes the page and instead of a URL parameter it creates a user friendly url of

mydomain.com/games-playstation-vita-psp/B0054QAS

However in the google index there is also the following friendly URL which is the same page - which I would like to remove

domain.com/games-playstation-vita/B0054QAS

The key to the rewrite on the above URLs is the /B0054QAS appended at the end - this tells the script which product to load, the details preceeding this could be in effect rubbish

i.e. domain.com/a-load-of-rubbish/B0054QAS and it would still bring back the same page as above.

What is the best way of resolving the duplicate URLs that are currently in the google index which is causing problems

The same issue is causing a quite serious a 5XX error on one of the generated URLs

http://www.mydomain.com/retailersname/1   -

, if I click on the link the link does work - it takes you to the retailers site, but again it is the number appended at the end that is the key - the retailersname is just there for user friendly search reasons

How can I block this or remove it from the results?

Hope you are still with me and can shed some light on these issues please.

Many Thanks

[Naghirniac]

To work on the duplicate problem, i think the best option is the cannonical tag. You will need to include in every page (pages you want to be the official one) inside the head tag the follow:

where ww.example.com/index.html is your page adress.

Than, to block old pages that you don't want to be at google, you can use the robots.txt file. There you will use the disallow function.

[ocelot]

How would using the canonical tag work though - because I am using URL rewriting?

For example

mydomain.com/games-playstation-vita-psp/B0054QAS

is acutally something like details.php?=B0054QAS - so how would a canonical tag work in a dynamic template like above.

Because if I placed the tag below in the details.php page then I would need this to change dynamically based on the product - how can this be done?

http://www.mydomain.com/games-playstation-vita-psp/B0054QAS/>

Or would a 301 redirect be better to achieve the above?

Many Thanks

[Dr-Pete]

This is really tough to tell from generic examples, because the first thing you need to get at is the root of why these different URLs are being crawled in the first place. If "B0054QAS" is a unique product, why is it reachable by "playstation-vita", "playstation-vita-psp", etc.? That architectural problem has to be solved first, or any canonicalization is just a band-aid.

[Dr-Pete]

You can write canonical tags dynamically, but you need to canonical to the product specific page. Obviously, don't canonical every details.php page down to one. It could look something like this:

$prodDesc = "games-playstation-vita";

$prodCode = "B0054QAS";

$prodURL = "http://www.mydomain.com/".prodDesc."/".prodCode;

?>

I assume that the product description and code are generated from a database, so they should be available somehow to the header.