/~username

[jwdl]

Hello,

The utility on this site that crawls your site and highlights what it sees as potential problems reported an issue with /~username access seeing it as duplicate content i.e. mydomain.com/file.htm is the same as mydomain.com~/username/file.htm so I went to my server hosts and they disabled it using mod_userdir but GWT now gives loads of 404 errors.

Have I gone about this the wrong way or was it not really a problem in the first place or have I fixed something that wasn't broken and made things worse?

Thanks,

Ian

[RyanKent]

If you see the issue in Google WMT, then somewhere a link to the /~username URL was found and crawled.

As a best practice, a link to the /~username URL should not be used on your site. Adding a canonical tag to your pages would have helped better manage this issue as well.

At this point, if those results were appearing in SERPs you can add a 301 redirect from the /~username URL to the correct one.

[jwdl]

Thank you for your response.

There are no links from anywhere that I control to it. The first I was aware that you could even access the site in this way was when the utility on this site reported it.

It causes no problems to the sites operation. The only links to the /~username pages are from other /~username pages except an obscure search engine links to a few pages.

I can't find any listing on google for the /~user name pages and in WMT it says "Generally, 404s don't harm your site's performance in search"

So in this case do I ignore it and the 404's will stop once it realises the other pages aren't there? (except links from external sites) or do I need to do something because its an SEO problem

[RyanKent]

I can't find any listing on google for the /~user name pages

In that case, you can safely ignore the issue if you are confident there are no links to those pages on your site.

[jwdl]

OK thanks for that.

Ian