URL Structure - Does google see any of this bad?

[jpservicez1]

Hope have posted this question under the right area..

Have been cleaning up my site as a result google penalty and amongst other areas am looking at is the URL structure. I currently have this structure

http://www.example.com/id/categoryid/catname/0

the trailing "/0" is for pagination purposes. So page 1 will have URl

http://www.example.com/id/categoryid/catname/1 and page 2

http://www.example.com/id/categoryid/catname/2

My issue is with the first page

does google see this as BAD URL structure by having " /0 " as the first page or it should simply be " / ".

If the answer is yes it should be just " / ", whats the best method of correcting this url structure as i have thousands of " /0 ". A 301 redirect.?

Thanks

[dusky]

To start with Search engines and particularly Google does not penalise for duplicate content resulting from two or more URLs leading to the same page, what it tends to do is filter out the less visited or the less linked to and leave out the only one. They stress that out in their patent as well as on Matt Cutts blog. However, for deliberate duplicate content under certain known black hat SEOs, they may.

For your URL structure, the way I see it is, if when you are on this page http://www.example.com/id/categoryid/catname/1 and you have the "Next>>" / "<< previous" links, if the previous takes the user to http://www.example.com/id/categoryid/catname/0, I don't see any duplicate page / URL there.

does google see this as BAD URL structure by having " /0 " as the first page or it should simply be " / ".

, I don't think so, seen the first page is /0 and there is no other way of referencing that first page except that. It'd have been wiser from the start before the site got spidered and gained back links to have a normal URL structure .../ as the first page though.

Like you and for 100s of pages affected, I would've been tempted to 301 redirect the ../0 to .../ but as many links would've got "backlinked" and bookmarked, I'd personally leave them as they are. What would be the issue is .../0 and .../1 having the same titles and content, and that would constitute a duplicate page, to avoid that and as long as the content is DIFFERENT, I'd have the .../0 as "How to cook widgets ¦ home page" and .../1 as "How to cook widgets ¦ page 1", hence two pages and the numbers do not matter as they are for navigation / pagination purposes only (of course how to cook widgets is an example title to whoever has just discovered the internet, not you) to gain extra link for each on the SERPs. It's not difficult either if you are using a CMS or dynamic pages, just have your Perl /PHP/ASP or whatever you are using include the $homepage and page $page from the paging variables from you DB.

I answered this as I had a similar problem which was caused by a CMS I am using on one of the sites I manage, on the next / previous links, the previous link (when on page 2) would take you to the page /articlexx-page1.html, seems normal you might say, BUT when you are accessing that page from somewhere else, the URL is /articlexx.html NOT /articlexx-page1, in addition to having two page titles but the same content which I corrected now. I did not bother placing 301 redirects as the pages in question were in the dozens rather than 100s and only affected pages which are too big and needed splitting. What I did was just correct the <<previous as /articlexx.html

[tedster]

I see no issues with the url itself - there rarely are such issues unless your urls use oddball characters, session ids and the like. Issues usually come up in the server technology that resolves the urls.

One server side pitfall you'll want to be careful with is that "catname" is not just added keyword fluff. Sometimes people set up url rewrites that only key off the numeric ID. If the keyword category names can be misspelled and the url will still resolve, that can be a problem.

[dusky]

...Sometimes people set up url rewrites that only key off the numeric ID. If the keyword category names can be misspelled and the url will still resolve, that can be a problem.

Tedster, you "hit the head on the nail" (back-to-front writing is deliberate), I have that issue right now, hitting the URL (head) on the nail (with an incorrect original URI) with one of the sites I manage, I have 90%+ of URLs rewritten as an example, .../titles-of-forums-xx.html, you only need to write the URL as .../whatever-you-like-but-leave-the-forum-ID.html and you can still get to the same page. I am not sure which course of action to take, but most likely either a function to 404 / 301 that in addition to a server site filter. I know as long as the URL does not exist on the site if it's not what is originally re-written, so there should or may not be a penalty, but you can't be too carefully who'll linking to your pages deliberately that way!

[g1smd]

The script should check all parts of the requested URL, and validate they are correct. Your choice whether to redirect to the correct URL, or send a 404 for "slightly incorrect" requests.

[CainIV]

"Like you and for 100s of pages affected, I would've been tempted to 301 redirect the ../0 to .../ "

Agreed. Somehow ending the page as a reference-able folder style url as opposed to open ended always seemed a better idea, but this probably spawns from older-school days where Google had a more difficult time differentiating...guess I just live things a little more tidy :)

[Pitafi]

great nice info:)