SEO Disaster

Contao somehow seems to be generating duplicate urls, for example:

http://www.doublespark.co.uk/ppc

and

http://www.doublespark.co.uk/207

These are both being indexed in Google, not good!

Any ideas why the ID url is being generated and how to stop it?

Any ideas, anyone?

I wish I did... "/207" is not in your sitemap file, and I couldn't find it anywhere in your code.

Could that have been a real page URL at one point (maybe a previous version or at some point when you first launched -- maybe aliases were turned off or not working properly at first)?

What I did notice is that if you are on "/207", the "Skip Navigation" links will say "/207#something", so it looks like a real link.

But the mystery is how/why Google would go there in the first place.

Hi Brian,

Firstly, Happy Easter!!

Thanks for taking a look.

I think Contao is at fault somewhere, in that it is generating pages like /207

If Contao did not generate them Google could/would not index them.

I also do not understand why they do not 404.

Cheers,

Gary.

"207" is the page ID. It usually works in place of the alias (I went to a few of our sites and entered numbers like 11,22,etc. and they do go to the corresponding page).

That's why I was asking about aliases. That was the only thing I could think of.

Have you been able to find any place in the source code of your site where those URLs appear?

Hi Brian,

Nope, I can't find reference to those URLs anywhere.

As a temporary solution I have added this to my .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^[0-9] http://www.doublespark.co.uk [R=301,L]

So that any number URLs get redirected to the home page, very clunky, but hopefully only temporary.

Thanks,

Gary.