I’m thinking of doing such structure for accessing some hypothetical page:
/foo/ID/some-friendly-string
The key part here is “ID” that identifies the page so everything that’s not ID is only relevant to SEO. I also want everything else that isn’t “/foo/ID/some-friendly-string” to redirect to the original link. Eg.:
- /foo/ID —> /foo/ID/some-friendly-string
- /foo/ID/some-friendly-string-blah —> /foo/ID/some-friendly-string
But what if somehow these links get “polluted” somewhere on the internet and spiders start accessing them with “/foo/ID/some-friendly-string-blah-blah-pollution” URLs? I don’t even know if this can happen, but if, say, some bad person decided to post thousands of such “different” links on some well known forums or some such – then google would find thousands of “different” URLs 301-redirecting to the same page.
In such case – would there be some sort of a penalty or is it all the same to google as long as the endpoint is unique and no content duplicates?
I might be a little paranoid with this, but that’s just my nature to investigate explaitable situations 🙂
Thanks for your thoughts
Your approach of using 301 redirect is correct.
301 redirects are very useful if people access your site through several different URLs.
For instance, your page for a given ID can be accessed in multiple ways, say:
It is a good idea to pick one of those URLs (you have decided to be
http://yoursite.com/foo/ID/some-friendly-string) as your preferred URL and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred one.I would also recommend adding canonical link to the HEAD section on the page e.g.
You can get more details on 301 redirects in:
I hope that will help you out with your decisions on redirects.
EDIT
I forgot to mention very good example, namely, Stack Overflow. The URL of this question is
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14318239/seo-301-redirect-limitsbut you can access it withhttp://stackoverflow.com/questions/14318239/blahblahand will get redirect to the original URL.