: How to prevent duplicate content in Google when using state and city in friendlyurl? I want to provide friendlyurls to my visitors on my venue site. Visitors should be able to easily type the
I want to provide friendlyurls to my visitors on my venue site.
Visitors should be able to easily type the name of a region to access the venues in that specific region.
Like
mydomain.com/<cityname>
and
mydomain.com/<statename>/<cityname>
For example:
mydomain.com/houston and mydomain.com/texas/houston
Ofcourse this URL: mydomain.com/houston is showing the exact same venues as mydomain.com/texas/houston
And Google considers this duplicate content. So now I'm thinking of creating a cannonical tag, saying this: mydomain.com/houston is my primary URL and point this URL mydomain.com/texas/houston to my primary URL.
update: why would I want these 2 urlformats in the first place? Because some visitors would like to know: show me all venues in texas, while others want to see all venues in a specific city, houston in this case. By using this format, users can simply change the url to see venues in a specific area. Also, Google seems to prefer that searchwords occur in the URL and occur in the beginning of the URL, so this way I target users searching on
statename AND on cityname.
Is this the best practice?
More posts by @Bryan171
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Personally I would do the opposite canonical - ie set /texas/houston as canon instead of /houston - the main reason being to avoid name clashes with identical names in other states. A URL of /springfield could be a little confusing, even if you are showing a specific Springfield page. You also get an extra keyword in the URL.
Secondly, I would always prefer a 301 Redirect to a canonical tag as it helps make the URL clearer to users (for reasons above) and if they copy-paste the URL anywhere, you get the direct URL.
If 2 indexed pages have the same content, indeed, it's duplicate content. And it's bad for SEO.
To avoid it, you can put the canonical meta on one of two URLs but why do you use two different format URL for the same content? I think it's not relevant for visitors.
You can choose one type for your URLs and keep it for the entire site. In that case, you can put 301 redirects from one to the second. For example: redirecting "www.mydomain.com/houston" to "www.mydomain.com/texas/houston" if you want to mention states in your site or the opposite if you don't want to mention states.
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