Duplicate content and URL's

[wazza1985]

Hi Guys,

Hope you are all well.

Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy

I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes.

Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL.

Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page?

Thank you for your help guys your legends!!

Cheers

Wayne

[perfectweb]

I recently did a similar thing on my site. I created a redirect (301) for all pages on the site. I then crated all new pages with exactly the same content using a friendly URL.

I didn't notice any drop in traffic or ranking (in fact it increased), but this was for a fairly small site in a not-overly competetive niche.

It is normal for 301 redirects to cause a temporary drop in ranking, but this should be gained wback within a coule of weeks and in my experience exceed because you now have nice seo friendly urls.right

[StalkerB]

Well, you're probably going to have to take the hit at some point, so might as well do the redirects sooner rather than later.

Doing a 301 redirect from the (presumably) old urls to the new you will lose some of the link juice (and I come down on the high end of the spectrum and say you lose 10%, others say less).

You'll also take a bit of a ranking hit while Google indexes the new URLs and repositions you. I've seen this take about 3 - 4 weeks, though could be longer. To aid here make sure and submit a new sitemap as soon as you're done.

Also, while you shouldn't pay attention to such things, remember that your toolbar PR is URL specific, so when you change them you will have all PR0 pages. These should come back after the next update, but they are few and far between. The background PR calculations will still be taking place and should steady themselves long before the toolbar is updated.

As for having to change the URLs, is there a possibility of rewriting them in apache? e.g. is the form site/page?parameter=category¶meter=pagename

So ultimately, yes you will take a bit of a knock, but overall it probably needs done and if you build from it then you should be able to recover and improve much more easily.

[perfectweb]

That's a good point.

Does your CMS allow you to updaet the URL of an existing page? If it does, I would recommend doing this (rather than recreating the pages) and then making sure you have a static rewrite setup for that page. This is pretty easy to do in Apache and IIS (there are plent of guides available through Google)