URL Problem

and how best to resolve it?

[chrisandsarah]

Hi
My site has now expanded to cover many towns but this has posed a new problem. Towns with the same name.
My current link structure doesnt cater for this, yet i cannot change it because of too many valuable incoming links. The current structure is this:

mydomain.com/townName-widgets/

I should have used this format:
mydomain.com/countyName/townName-widgets/
as i now discover there are some towns in my new database which have the same name, although they are in a different county.

So, on my site now i need to, when someone clicks on a town to view available widgets in that town, present them with a list of links to other towns with same name but in different counties. Just incase they meant townName1 in county 'B' instead of townname1 in county 'A'.

My programmer has set it up so this happens which is great, but it presents a url problem.
From the start of the project I instructed him that we MUST keep our existing url's as we have built many incoming links to them.
So what happens now is, a visitor comes into the site, clicks on countyA, is presented a list of towns within countyA. If they click on townName1 they go to a page listing widgets in townName1 which has a url of
mydomain.com/townName1-widgets/ (which is our existing url structure)
IF there is townname1 in other counties, a list comes up and the url's for them are the NEW structure, e.g mydomain.com/countyB/townName1-widgets/
mydomain.com/countyC/townName1-widgets/

This works fine except for the fact that we now have duplicate content depending on how a visitor gets to the page listing widgets in townName1.
E.g
They could be looking at:
mydomain.com/countyA/townName1-widgets/
or
mydomain.com/townName1-widgets/ (which is the default url if they came in through the CountyA link.

Does this make sense? If not I will rewrite and repost, sorry.
If anyone can see a way around this, I would be grateful.
Chrisandsar

[King of Bling]

Not sure if this will help, but the Weather Channel website handles this quite nicely. Type in a common town and look into the link structure of the results.

Good luck
KOB

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Edited to add: they use ZIP codes.
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[jetboy_70]

If your only concern is duplicate content (and I assume the accompanying Google risks) you could always block certain sections of the site to spiders using robots.txt - remember Google will see this as a static site - or even dynamically write a noindex,nofollow robots metatag into a page dependent on which URL is used to access it.

Even something as simple as sniffing the amount of forward slashes in the URL would be enough to differentiate between the two formats.