Is it bad for SEO to have an 'article' published under 2 urls?

Question

Hi, On our new website we publish an article once and can tag it to appear in several sections eg.

blahblah.com/insight/10-05-21/Buzzcity-releases-mobile-game-library.aspx

blahblah.com/international_media/10-05-21/Buzzcity-releases-mobile-game-library.aspx

Is it better for SEO to have the 2 different urls which include important keywords like ‘insight’ and ‘international media’ or is it better to have a single generic url? E.g. blahblah.com/articles/10-05-21/Buzzcity_releases_mobile_game_library.aspx

I read somewhere that google doesn’t like the same content ‘duplicated’ in 2 (or 3) places - I am not a tecchie.

THanks

Answer 1

Google will penalise for duplication. The way that you should solve this is to indicate a canonical url scheme to Google.

See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 and http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139066

Personally, I would put all the keywords you want in one heading and always remember the golden rule of SEO: the best way to get good rankings is to have good, relevant, content.

Answer 2

A canonical link should only be used if the duplicate content problem cannot be solved at it's source. Assuming you're in charge of the URL-scheme of the website, you should consider reformatting it.

Personally, I try to keep a hierarchical url-scheme. If your articles are related to a number of things (tags, authors, sections), think about how your data is related. If your article cannot logically exist without a related element (e.g. deleting a section from a newspaper, would logically cause a cascade delete on it's articles) it should be considered for use as parent in the URL hierarchy. If no such relation is present, the URL-scheme should be formatted accordingly.

Consider the following examples. You can choose between a number of parents for your articles example.com/authors/alichard/articles/buzzcity..., example.com/tags/insight/articles/buzzcity..., etc.

In the end, there is no right way to do it. But IMHO you should either stash all your tags in the article URL (example.com/insight+international_media/buzzcity...) or go for a tag-less article URL (example.com/articles/buzzcity and example.com/articles/tagged/insight for article listing).