It's the case with duplicate URLs and you can avoid these kind of duplicate URLs using a URL factory redirecting all URLs which are not proper to the proper URL.
And the same thing is explained in this article:
https://www.tinywebhut.com/remove-duplicate-urls-from-your-website-38
Any other URLs leading to the same page are 301 redirected to the proper version of the URLs.
This is the best practice of Search Engine Optimization(SEO). Here I'm going to give you a couple of examples.
You can consider the URLs of this website, for example the wrong links of this page are
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51685850
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51685850/convert-url-into-one-s
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51685850/
If you go to the above wrong URLs of this page, you'll be redirected to the proper URL which is
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51685850/convert-url-into-one-standard-format
And if you change the title of this question, all other URLs are 301 redirected to the proper URL. The idea here is the 301 redirection which tells the search engines to replace the old URL with the new one otherwise the search engines find different URLs providing the same content.
The real deal here is the id of the question, 51685850
. This id is used to create the proper URL with the information from the database. With the URL factory that is created in the article in the link provided, you do not even need to store URLs in the database.
You can read more on duplicate content here:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
The same rules are applied to tinywebhut.com as well, the wrong URLs are
https://www.tinywebhut.com/remove-duplicate-38
https://www.tinywebhut.com/some-text-38
https://www.tinywebhut.com/remove-duplicate-urls-from-your-website-38/
In the above URLs the ID is appended to the end of the URL which is 38
and if you go to any of these URLs, you'll be 301 redirected to the proper version of the URLs which is
https://www.tinywebhut.com/remove-duplicate-urls-from-your-website-38
I didn't make any functions to explain this here because it is already done in this article:
https://www.tinywebhut.com/remove-duplicate-urls-from-your-website-38
You can achieve the goal with a couple of really simple functions and you can apply the same idea to remove other duplicate URLs such as /about.php
, /about
, /about.php/
, /about/
and so on. And to achieve this you just need a little more code to your existing functions.
One alternative is adding canonical tag, for example, even if you have more than one URL to go the same page, you just need to apply canonical tag and add the link to the proper URL.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51685850/convert-url-into-one-standard-format" />
This way you are telling the search engines that the multiple URLs should be considered as one and the search engines add the link used in the canonical tag in their search results. You can read more on canonicalization here:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
But still the best way to get rid of duplicate content is the 301 redirect. If you have a 301 redirect like I talked at the beginning, all problems are solved without surprises.