Seo friendly urls with unique id as a directory count as duplicate content ?

Question

Hello,

I am looking to implement a similar url as stackoverflow to an eshop:

http://wwww.shop.com/products/123123/product-name

But i have a few concerns: 1. does google consider it duplicate content as the page:

http://wwww.shop.com/products/123123/

1. I knew that google alwasy goes down the url, does it not consider the numbers as an unnecessary level, wich would make your page have less importance

thanks a lot :)

Answer 1

If you check the source code on this page you will see that there is a meta tag called canonical. It is used to tell Google which URL is the preferred version of the same page.

So in your example you would have this URL:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://wwww.shop.com/products/123123/product-name"&gt;

I'm not sure how much the other search engines care about this tag.

See Google's blog post about it http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Answer 2

1

Look into the canonical tag Google has introduced recently. It allows you to set one specific URL where the original content is located.

In your example this tag would be in the head of both pages:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://wwww.shop.com/products/123123/" />

That way Google knows it is not duplicate content but simply the same page under a different URL.

2

Another way to solve this is to always canonicalize your URL using redirects. You'd have to settle on one of the two URL versions and than always redirect from any other version to that one using a 301.

So given you'd consider

http://wwww.shop.com/products/123123/product-name/

to be the URL to access a product. If someone opens that product page with the URL

http://wwww.shop.com/products/123123/

you'd simply redirect him to the former.