How to setup a redirect from one subfolder to another to avoid duplicate content.

[Michael_Rock]

Hello All,

I have a WordPress site that Moz says has duplicate content.

http://deltaforcepi.com/latest-news/page/3
http://deltaforcepi.com/category/latest-news/page/3

So I set up an addition to the .htaccess file . . .

redirect code to move from one folder to another

RewriteRule ^category/latest-news/(.*)$ /latest-news/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

What did I do wrong? I am not proficient in .htaccess files.

[mosquitohawk]

I believe it should be-

RewriteRule ^category/latest-news/(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/latest-news/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Try that and see if it doesn't fix it for you.  (Replace 'yourdomain.com' with your real domain of course.)

[Michael_Rock]

Nope, that didn't do it. I see that WordPress creates duplicate content from having an archive of posts made on the website. Maybe If I can have an robot.txt file that does not crawl that directory???

[gazzerman1]

Google has always said and very recently repeated that internal duplicate content is not an issue, Google will simply decide on what content is best to return results too.

If you are concerned you have a few options instead of what you are doing.

Use the meta noindex so that Google does not index the data. If you cant do that because of wordpress then this can be set externally Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag

Hope that helps. Personally I would keep the page up because Google is used to dealing with wordpress and would punish thousands of sites if this was really an issue.

[Michael_Rock]

Thank you, I did not think it would have been an issue either but the customer did not like seeing that on the report and wanted it fixed. I will look into how to setup a robots.txt file to take care of this.

Michael