Duplicate content, canonical and seasonally changing of home page content

[dormroommovers]

This post is deleted!

[sferrino]

A few issues with this situation. I wouldn't move the seasonal stuff to the home page if they have their own pages, and the way it is being done here is creating duplicate content. I have never seen this done before where someone if moving an internal page to the home page and looking to have a canonical from the home page to an internal page. I would probably recode it so that it is an item featured on the home page and not the full home page.Adding in a canonical and changing out the canonical will most likely do more harm than good.

A better situation might be to redirect the home page to that seasonal page, but I would still venture towards having it as a featured item on a home page that is in fact the home page.

As for the internal stuff, you have duplicate content. Just changing a few words on the page doesn't reduce it that much, and your descriptions aren't really changing at all. Since you have very few colleges I would create individual pages for each college, make the content different by including the teams, campuses, etc.

Usually anything after a ? in the URL is considered the same URL. Granted on Page 6 (for me) using the site command:

site: dormroommovers.com

Shows the full listing of schools.

Using a canonical to the page:

/How-Ship-To-School-Works.php?School=Goucher College

I would advised against, and am not really sure it would do what you want.

If you want to still use the pages with the duplicate content you can use an htaccess and rewrite the individual colleges to that script, so you don't have to recode anything. you could then canonical to those versions. So using the above example change it to:

/move-to/Gougher-College/ or /Gougher-College/ etc.

RewriteRule ^/Gougher-College/$  /How-Ship-To-School-Works.php?School=Goucher-College

[dormroommovers]

This post is deleted!

[sferrino]

Glad that helped.

There's a few different ways to get across this depending on who is coding it and how the backend is setup.

In Example 1 you can do:

The htaccess rule will look like:

RewriteRule ^Ship-to-(.*)/$         /your-php-script.php?school=$1  [QSA,L]

with the page being:

http://www.dormroommovers.com/Ship-to-Arizona-State-University/

So the "Arizona-State-University" will be the search term for your database query, which looks like the way you are currently doing it. Now there are 2 drawbacks to this:

1. You are doing a text search in a database which is not as efficient as a numeric,
2. Any text string can be created: /Ship-To-Example-text-Arizona-State-University/ will work as well. This is where canonical's really help reduce duplicate problems.

In example 2 we move over to using a numeric value which also has 2 drawback:

The htaccess rule will look like:

RewriteRule ^Ship-to-(.)-(.)/$         /your-php-script.php?school=$2  [QSA,L]

with the page being:

http://www.dormroommovers.com/Ship-to-Arizona-State-University-23/

So the "Arizona-State-University" is just for SEO value, and the value of the item we are looking for in your database query is $2 since it is the second variable (.*) in our URL string or '23'. Using Auto Insert Id in the database table for the schools makes sure that there is only 1 item with that ID and the database will automatically INDEX that column to make it faster for searching.

The drawbacks:

1. It adds a level of ugliness to your URLs,
2. Any text string can be still be created: /Ship-To-Example-text-Arizona-State-University-23/ will work as well. However, the database will work more efficiently. Canonical's also help here to reduce duplicate problems.

Now, you can also do caching to keep the database from doing additional queries on pages that do not change, or don't change that often.

Other things I would look into to get rid of the duplicate content is;

Can you currently:

• Edit the content and make different pages?
• Change them to individual descriptions per page?
• Add elements like the school colors, pictures of cheerleaders, etc.
• List the dorms,
• Have Google location maps for each

If not, have that stuff worked in. Just changing out the school name is going to cause problems with duplicate content if it is not already.

Let me know if I answered everything.

[dormroommovers]

This post is deleted!

[sferrino]

If you are going to be leaving the first "indexed" one up for the time being add in a canonical as soon as you can. If not, 301 it to the new one. It may be indexed, but I don't see a benefit to it since there isn't any description to the ones you already have in there and they probably aren't ranking:

Google listings