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Kind of duplicate pages. Don't know how to clean up mess.

by 2Way10
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
A new person was hired to run our site and they created a whole lot of new landing pages. Some of them were pretty much duplicates with the intention of creating a better handle for even greater SEO in the long run.

So, for instance, if the handle was /collections/birds it may have become /collections/bird-statues. The new URL was slotted into the menu navigation and the old URL was left hanging in space with no navigation point.

The old URL has good history and ranks for important key words. The new URL ranks poorly and is trying to steal the keyword from the old URL.

The ecom director's idea was that the new URL would eventually build up strength and the old one could be eliminated. I'm certain we've taken an SEO hit because of this. I'm now discovering a lot of pages like this.

Not sure what to do here. I don't want to lose the history and strength of the older URLs but would like to see if we can keep the potential of the new URL. Any ideas?
#clean #duplicate #kind #mess #pages
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Do a 301 redirect of each old URL to the corresponding new URL.
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    • Profile picture of the author 2Way10
      Thanks. I hardly can believe it's that simple.
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by 2Way10 View Post

        Thanks. I hardly can believe it's that simple.
        It is.

        301 redirects transfer the authority and relevance from one URL to another.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    First you need to clean up the entire site, assuming there's still old/broken URLs (nav links, internal URLs, etc...). Screaming Frog can help you find those broken links. It's sloppy to leave broken URLs that you control (your own site/s) and Google would still be looking at those old URLs in your HTML source code instead of the new URLs. You need to train Google to focus on the new URLs.

    301 redirects are fine for links from other domains/pages that you can't control.

    When you're done cleaning up the site and have the 301s setup and If you have any old xml sitemaps, rebuild the sitemaps with the new URLs. Submit the sitemaps to Google to help speed up the site reindex and get the SERPs updated.
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  • Profile picture of the author hnrindani
    The best way to clean up the mess is 301 redirect from Old URL to the new one and remove the old page from the server. Once you have removed the page, re-submit the site to Google.
    Benefits:
    1. There will not be an issue for duplicate content
    2. You can still leverage from the earlier submission of the old URL as part of Off-Page SEO
    3. Will add to the reputation of new URL
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  • Profile picture of the author JennyPitula
    You have to use 301 redirection code for each and every URL. So the users will redirect on the old URL.
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  • Profile picture of the author Madhukar B
    You can also find duplicate page through Google Web Master tools.
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    • Profile picture of the author 2Way10
      Thanks everyone. The collection pages that I don't want to use are live and don't have a problem, so the 301 sounds like the best solution for now. Will look through my screaming frog report for anything broken.
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