Smart Traffic SEO Tip #32 – SEO Problems with Database-driven Sites
A database-driven site is a type of dynamic website where webpage content is extracted from a database. Having potential duplicate pages is one of the most common problems encountered for database-driven websites. This is caused by the page being called from the database by the last part of the url rather than the complete url. This means that you can change any part before the product number in the url and it will still load. Below is a sample scenario from which pages having the same content exist with different URLs:
SAMPLE SCENARIO:
Preferred Page: http://www.example.co.uk/blue-polo-shirt/p-3878.html
Duplicate page: http://www.example.co.uk/type-anything-you-want-here/p-3878.html
Duplicate page: http://www.example.co.uk/p-3878.html
If linked to and indexed these pages could create massive amounts of duplicate content and effect rankings. Ideally they should 301 re-direct to the correct version or you could use a canonical tag. However, be careful with this second option. If you use an auto generated canonical tag then you could end up with a tag that says each one of these pages is correct causing Google even more confusion!
So for database-driven websites, it is not always safe to use “generated canonical tags”. 301 redirection is still the best thing to do in dealing with duplicates and for nonexisting pages they should be fixed returning 404 status instead of 200. If ever you have to use a canonical tag it is better to use non-auto-generated URLs inside the link canonical tag.
