Multiple URLs and Dup Content

[accessKellyOCG]

Hi there,

I know many people might ask this kind of question, but nevertheless ....

In our CMS, one single URL (http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/) has been produced nearly 9000 times with strings like this: http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/$12203/$12204/$12204/ and this http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/$12203/$12204/$12205/ and so on and so on...

Today, I wrote our IT-department to either a) delete the pages with the "strange" URLs or b) redirect them per 301 onto the "original" page.

Do you think this was the best solution? What about implementing the rel=canonical on these pages?

Right now, there is only the "original" page in the Google index, but who knows? And I don't want users on our site to see these URLs, so I thought deleting them (they exist only a few days!) would be the best answer...

Do you agree or have other ideas if something like this happens next time?

Thanx in advance...

[NakulGoyal]

I would strongly suggest doing the rel=canonical tag on all pages to the original/correct URLs. So in your CMS, the canonical tag is added, all those variations of the pages will point to the same URL just in case Google Bots find those pages.

You are on the right track about doing a canonical.

[mediabase]

Hi Stefan,

Since you have multiple URLs containing same data you have to redirect the extra links to the original URL and to do that you can either use the 301 redirect code or the rel="canonical" in the repeated pages.Deleting might not be the best solution because it would take up a lot of time. Instead go for redirection  of those pages and I think that since there are too many pages to redirect the rel="canonical" would be the right option.And you must do this fast since the original page has already been indexed by the search engine.

[accessKellyOCG]

Thanks Nakul and Harald for helping.

So, we will implement the rel=canonical on these pages...

Thanx again!!!

[Dr-Pete]

One additional comment, and it's tricky. You need to find the crawl path creating these, BUT you don't necessarily want to block it yet. Add the canonical, and let Google keep crawling these pages. Otherwise, the canonical can't do its job properly. Then, once they've cleared out, fix the crawl path.

Are you seeing this in our (SEOmoz) tools or in Google? I'm not actually seeing these variants indexed, so it could potentially be a glitch. It looks a bit like some kind of session variable.