URL Duplication Issues

[venunath]

How to resolve the Url Duplication Issues?

I am unable to control the Url Duplication Issues. Most of my keywords are ranking for duplicate urls instead of main pages.

Recently i lost my page rank and ranking for main pages and ranking for duplicate urls for same keywords which we used to rank for main pages.

To avoid duplication i kept canonical tag in duplicate page referring to main pages but still duplicate pages are ranking in SERP. Can any one suggest me what to do?

[g1smd]

Without specific details, it's not possible to give specific advice.

Duplicate content is a regular topic here so there are very many threads detailing the problems - and their solutions.

[Robert Charlton]

venunath - Use example.com as the sample domain to illustrate the canonical problems you're experiencing.

Or, is this a multiple domain issue? If so, we would need more description and information, but not the specific domains.

Before you post, take a look at the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] section, pinned to the top of the Google SEO forum home page. It has a whole section on duplicate content issues.

(Note that we suggest example.com because it can never be owned. The forum's software works well with it and doesn't auto-link when you use it).

[venunath]

Hi All Thanks.

www.example.com/Text/ is main page and now i am ranking for duplicate url www.example.com/text/

How to remove the page from SERP? and start getting ranking for main page.

[Robert Charlton]

Is your site hosted on a Microsoft server?

[venunath]

Yes,

[venunath]

i kept <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> all duplicated pages and Canonical tag too. But still all duplicate pages are displaying in SERP. Can you give me suggestions.

[phranque]

you are going to need this - Configure Case Sensitivity for File and Folder Names:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725747.aspx [technet.microsoft.com]

[venunath]

any other seo suggestions?

[aakk9999]

The best would be to 301 redirect duplicate URLs to "main" page. But in Microsoft IIS this can be more tricky if you do not use IIS 7 or IIS6 with ISAPI Rewrite - in which case you would need to make the change in .NET application.

The next option (and probably the easiest one) would be to implement canonical link element.

To avoid duplication i kept canonical tag in duplicate page referring to main pages but still duplicate pages are ranking in SERP.

How long since you have implemented canonical? Google needs to re-crawl all duplicate pages in order to see canonical link element. Sometimes you may have to wait some months in order for Google to get the correct URL ranking.
Also, have you checked that canonical link element has a correct syntax, i.e. the full URL including protocol and host name? I have seen more than once canonical link element using incorrect <meta name="canonical" ... syntax rather than <link rel="canonical" ... syntax

[phranque]

i would suggest going all lower case in the url path and internally rewrite any url containing upper case in the path to a script that will determine the canonical url and issue a 301 response redirecting to the canonical url.

use only canonical urls in your internal linking and navigation.