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Strange indexing/url issue/bug

This is a discussion on Strange indexing/url issue/bug within the Troubleshooting forums, part of the vBSEO SEO Plugin category; I was looking at my Google webmater account today and noticed Google seems to be picking up a lot of ...

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    Senior Member Dave Hybrid's Avatar
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    Strange indexing/url issue/bug

    I was looking at my Google webmater account today and noticed Google seems to be picking up a lot of pages with duplicate meta/title.

    On closer inspection when someone creates a post with a ' in it creates a url like so:

    Title: What's going on

    www.domain.com/whats-going-on/

    So the comma is ignored, yet some how Google webmaster tools is reporting finding a second url as so:

    www.domain.com/what-s-going-on/

    Noticed the - replacing the '.

    For the life of me I cannot find how it is finding these duplicate urls.

    Also when I visit the duplicate url with the - as the ' it is 301'd to the url without the -.

    So vbseo knows about the duplicate in order to auto redirect to it, why create two it in the first place? There is no need to make two 2 then auto 301 to one or the other.

    So in short Google is somehow finding duplicate urls for the same content but only for threads with ' in them.

    Any help appreciated, pic attached.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails example.gif  
    Last edited by Dave Hybrid; 07-12-2008 at 08:23 AM.

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    Senior Member Dave Hybrid's Avatar
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    Update:

    vbseo 3.1 - when ' are in titles replaces them with a - eg: www.domain.com/what-s-going-on/

    vbseo 3.2 - when ' are in the titles replaces them with nothing. eg: www.domain.com/whats-going-on/

    So since upgrading from 3.1 to 3.2 Google is picking up loads of duplicate URLs and causing reindexing of my site.

    A massive bug I thing you will agree.
    Last edited by Dave Hybrid; 07-12-2008 at 09:54 AM.

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    Senior Member Dave Hybrid's Avatar
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    To add my site went from 8k uniques a day to 0 from Google.

    All I did was update vbseo and clearly changing 10,000s of url all at once will cause major issues.

    When I upgraded I used my backup file to restore the settings so my urls should stay 100% identical.

    **Edit**

    From reports on the web many sites have lost all traffic so I doubt this is the cause but this bug is still a problem.
    Last edited by Dave Hybrid; 07-12-2008 at 09:16 PM.

  4. #4
    Senior Member
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    To add my site went from 8k uniques a day to 0 from Google.
    Our site has not dropped any traffic from Google, we upgraded to vbseo 3.2 the day it came out.

    We do however have an awful lot of duplicate meta descriptions, in fact 18,155 of them - Picture attached. I wonder if this is the same scenario as what you are saying Dave?
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails duplicatepages.jpg  

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    Senior Member Dave Hybrid's Avatar
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    Whether this is responsible or not it is still a bad idea to change urls at any point, 1'000s at a time. You will lose links that point to the changed pages and the new urls/pages will have 0 trust.

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    Senior Member Dave Hybrid's Avatar
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    Can any of the staff comment on this.

    It would appear the new vbseo is changing url structure so that would be a bit of a problem, no?

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