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I was wondering if a site using both pretty urls and dynamic urls will be penalized for duplicate content.

Let's say http://example.com/article/1 is the same as http://example.com/?article=1. Is this bad for SEO?

Extra question: Entering http://example.com/?blabla=qwerty will load the default home page. Is http://example.com/?blabla=qwerty treated as different page than http://example.com ?

What happens if the user enters http://example.com/????article=1, is it different than http://example.com/?article=1? Thanks

Ezio_
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    If you have a pretty URL, why would you also want a query string version? I'd say as a general rule, if you can avoid your URL space creating duplicate link formats, it's a good idea. – halfer Dec 25 '14 at 15:15
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about the behaviour of search engine services. It might be on-topic on [webmasters.se]. – unor Dec 26 '14 at 17:04

2 Answers2

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Forget end users - if search engine bot can index both the pages then it's bad SEO.

Let's say if Google is indexing http://example.com/article/1 as well as http://example.com/?article=1 then it will be treated as duplicate content on same site.

However http://example.com/?blabla=qwerty and http://example.com and all such variations are treated as a single page.

So it's not bad for SEO, but definitely not a good strategy. Best practice is to redirect http://example.com/?article=1 to http://example.com/article/1.

halfer
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Pavan Jiwnani
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  1. http://example.com/article/1 and http://example.com/?article=1 is treated as two different URLs to a search engine. They are bad for SEO because of the following reasons:

    • link juice is split between the 2 URLs
    • duplicate content on the same site as mentioned by Pavan.

  2. As in 1, the same principle applies. http://example.com/?blabla=qwerty is indeed treated as a different page than http://example.com/

  3. http://example.com/????article=1 is indeed different from http://example.com/?article=1. In the first case, the GET parameter is "???article" having a value of 1 and the second example, the GET parameter is "article" having a value of 1.

Now to solve this, you can use one of several strategies:

Use Canonical URLs

The Canonical URL serves to consolidate link signals for the duplicate or similar content. More to read on Google Webmaster Tools. In your case, you should add a canonical URL in the header such as.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/article/1" />

More background information can be found on Moz

Use 301 redirects

Where links are not canonical, use 301 permanent redirects to pass over the link juice to the new URL. Reference: Moz 301

Using rel="next" and rel="prev"

Where there's paginated content, use HTML attributes rel="next" and rel="prev" to indicate to google that the pages are paginated and linked. This will solve handle issues such as ?page=1 and ?page=2. Read more about Indicate paginated content at Google.

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?page=1">
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?page=3">
maskie
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  • As far as I see most pages do nothing when a dummy parameter is entered, e.g. adding http://example.com/?article=1&foo=bar loads the same page http://example.com/?article=1 without redirecting and without Isn't it treated as duplicate content? What if I show 404 error if extra dummy parameter is added? I still think that parameters should not affect the actual url with no parameters. But I think adding canonical url is the best practice. – Ezio_ Dec 26 '14 at 16:01
  • To a webserver, a URL with a query string and another one with a different query string will be treated as 2 different URLs. Hence for SEO, they will be treated as such. When the URLs serve out duplicate content, they will be clustered together and in this case, a canonical url can be used. It is also possible to use 301 redirects; what I had done previously, is on the server side, to determine if the URL is in the pretty format. If it is not pretty, it will 301 redirect to the pretty one. In this way, there is no inconsistency when others copy and paste to share the link. – maskie Dec 27 '14 at 00:37