Optimal site structure for travel site

[sembseo]

Hi there,

I am seo-managing a travel website where we are going to make a new site structure next year.

We have about 4000 pages on the site at the moment.

The structure is only 2-levels at the moment:

Level 1: Homepage

Level 2: All other pages (4000 individual pages - (all with different urls))

We are adding another 2-3 levels, but we have a challenge:

We have potentially 2 roads to the same product (e.g. "phuket diving product")

domain.com/thailand/activities/diving/phuket-diving-product.asp

domain.com/activities/diving/thailand/phuket-diving-product.asp

I would very much appreciate your view on the problem:

How do I solve this dilemma/challenge from a SEO standpoint? I want to avoid DC if possible, I also only want one landing page - for many reasons. And usability is of course also very important.

Best regards,

Chris

[sicseo]

Hi Chris

With over 4000 pages on your site I'm assuming you are using some kind of CMS? Either way I would recommend the use of the rel=canonical tag to counter this potential duplicate content issue.

It helps by a. proving to the search engine's you are already aware of this issue and b. clarify which of the duplicate pages they should prioritise and pass DA to.

SEOmoz have published a great post on the various options on how to implement the code which can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content.

The other option would be to use 301's. In my experience implementing 301's on a window's server (assuming this is the case as your url extension is .asp?) can be tricky. The management of hundred's of 301's can also become very cumbersome and complicated often resulting in infinite loop errors.

Hope that helps.

All the best

Alex