A Few Internal URLs Indexed as Home - checklist to determine why?

[irldonalb]

Hi,

Google has indexed a few internal pages as a different page. For example:

URL: http://www.example.com/page?variable=2
Indexed as: http://www.example.com/page

URL: http://www.example.com/another?variable=2
Indexed as: http://www.example.com/another

Content is completely different. If you view the Google Cache it returns the wrong page (and the wrong URL)

This is unusual as we have several pages with different variables and values its only happening on a few pages. It’s really bugging me as these are key category pages that link to several internal pages.

Is there a check list people use when this happens?

- No noindex tag in the header
- No Canonical Tag
- Several links to pages
- No redirects present
- Pages listed in XML Sitemap

Thanks
Donal

[tedster]

Another idea: Request those pages using Firefox with the UserAgentSwitcher add-on installed and set to googlebot. See if there's a problem with those urls that is only served to googlebot.

Similarly, you could check them out with the LiveHTTPHeaders add-on so you see exactly what your server's responses are.

[irldonalb]

Cheers Tedster,

They're good tests. I also disabled JS and cookies using WM toolbar.

However, I had no such luck as the pages returned fine.

[Robert Charlton]

While I'm a believer in finding root causes, it might be interesting to see if the canonical tag helps here... ie, on

URL: http://www.example.com/page?variable=2

...use the canonical tag with the variable.

Try on just one or two pages.

[irldonalb]

Its already there, I'm just waiting on it to kick in ;)

However I'm not convinced it will work as I'm putting it on a page that I'm not sure if Google is reaching.

[tedster]

How about checking your server's logfiles to see what googlebot is requesting?

[irldonalb]

Hi All

A quick update:

As a few of you advised, I put canonical tags into this page.

I arrived in this morning to learn that we are penalised. We're ranked 217 and 62 for phrases we previously ranked top 10 for.

I don't think this was caused by the canonical tags alone - I think it’s because the tags are linking to a page Google can't access properly (for whatever reason).

Canonical tags have been removed and I’m looking into the underlying issue.

I've requested log files from the server engineers but I'm not optimistic. These files are large and overwritten every few hours. I might get lucky.

Further updates to follow…

Thanks
Donal