Advice on Unique content issue - please

[Zipster]

Hi

I'm in the middle of developing an ecommence site and I've come across an issue using mod_rewrite. There are two ways of getting to the same product page;

site.co.uk/laptops/sony_blah_blah.html

and (via the manfacturer drop down)

site.co.uk/sony/sony_blah_blah.html

will search engines read the fake directory structure and assume they are different pages with the same content?

Thanks
Tom

 

[IanTurner]

Yes thats a dupe content issue

What you need to do is to ensure each of your product pages only has one unique URL.

e.g.

/laptops/sony/model-1234.html
/laptops/sony/model-1235.html
.
.
.


and that

/manufacturers/sony/index.html links to each of the unique product URLs.

 

[Zipster]

Thanks for the reply, but even though each product page is unique, its the fake directory layout that concerns me.

a more detailed example

site.co.uk/laptops/sony_123.html
and
site.co.uk/sony/sony_123.html

the same page but made to look like they are from different locations.

Will google see this as duplicate content?

 

[BFTUK]

site.co.uk/laptops/sony_123.html
and
site.co.uk/sony/sony_123.html

the same page but made to look like they are from different locations.

Will google see this as duplicate content?

Yes.

One way around it uising the example you've given would be to exclude using robots text some of the directories.

For example exclude SONY pages but allow all laptops pages to be index, however this is far from ideal.

 

[IanTurner]

That's what I was trying to get at

Effectively your product pages are not unique if they have two different URLs

You manufacturers links need to link to
site.co.uk/laptops/sony_blah_blah.html

rather than to /sony/sony_blah_blah.html

 

[Zipster]

Thanks guys, I'll have a rethink of the structure.

Cheers