What is best practice for fixing urls that have duplicate content, non-static and other issues?

[bendyman]

Hi,

I know there are several good answers regarding duplicate content issues on this website already, however I have a question that involves the best way to avoid negative SEO impacts if I change the urls for an ecommerce site. Basically a new client has the following website http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk and I notice that it suffers from duplicate content due to the http://www version and the non www version of the pages - this seems quite easy to fix using the guidance on this website. However I notice that the product page urls are far from ideal in that they have several issues including:-

(a) they are mostly too long

(b) don't include the keyword terms (in terms of best practice)

(c) they don't use Static URLS

An example of one these product urls would be http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk/plant-details.php?name=Autumn Glory&p_genus=Hebe&code=heagl&category=hebe

I'd like to address these issues, but the pages rank highly for the products themselves, therefore my question is what would you recommend I do to fix the urls without risking the high positions that many of these product pages have?

thanks,

Ben

[DirkC]

For the url's - my advice would be: if it ain't broken - don't fix it. While static url's may be the best situation - Google is quite capable to analyse the parameters in the url.

You could fix the url's & put 301 from the old to the new - but if the products rank well on the current url I wouldn't touch them. Check also this old post on webmaster central : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

While the main topic is unrelated to your question - this article http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html also gives you insight on how Google deals with parameters in the url.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[bendyman]

Thanks Dirk, that is good to know. The pages do rank very well, so I think I'll ignore my previous thoughts regarding how the URLs should look/behave and leave them as they are for now.

Many thanks!

[Stramark]

you could introduce breadcrumbs. It will make the URL nicer in the search results of google without changing the URL!