Three Common URL Problems

Problem 1: 

Non-www and www Versions of Site URLs

If your site has a non-www and www version of all your URLs, you’re going to be splitting link value for the same content between two URLs. Rather than capturing 100% of the link value on the page you want to rank in the search results, you could be doing a 50/50, 60/40, or some other kind of split between the two URLs.

Problem 2: 

Duplicate Home Page URLs

This is a close cousin to Problem 1, but is especially bad because it’s your home page.

It is possible to have a lot of different URLs that all go to your home page content, especially if you haven’t fixed your www and non-www duplication, which can result in a lot of unnecessary duplication.

For example:

• http://www.mysite.com

• http://mysite.com

• http://www.mysite.com/index.html

• http://mysite.com/index.html

These URLs will all lead to the same content. If you have links going to all four of them you will see a four-way split in link value. There are a lot of sites out there that have fixed their non-www and www problems, but I can still find multiple versions of their home page.

I’ve even come across sites with different extensions (.php, .html, .htm, etc.) that bring up the same page as well. This leads to even more duplication and potentially wasted link value.

Problem 3: 

Dynamic URLs

This is a fun one that a lot of not-so-SEO-friendly shopping cart programs run into. Once you start including all sorts of variables and parameters in your URLs, the opportunities for duplicate content and wasted link value are endless.

All of the following URLs could lead to the same content:

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111&id=423

Now what if I start rearranging the parameters? Well, they’ll still show the same content. So, as you might imagine, this can create a lot of wasted link value.

There are other causes for the dynamic URL problem. A lot of companies use these parameter-based URLs for statistical purposes.

This problem also happens with sites that give their affiliates a unique ID to use in their links. You could have 100 affiliates linking to the same page, but all of the URLs will be different because each affiliate has their own unique ID.

These are 3 Common URL Problems that you can face while running your website.

But How can you Fix URL problems, covers in the next post.