Hi,
I'm getting a lot of duplicate tags being flagged up in Google Webmaster tools that just seem to be duplicates of different cased text. For example:
Vodafone-V1520.html
is a duplicate with:
Vodafone-v1520.html
These are coming up all over the place within title tags and description tags for brands, categories and product names.
Does anyone know if this can be sorted within Google Webmaster? I can't find an 'ignore case differences' type setting but it seems crazy to get a dupe penalty based on characters in a different case! If there's no way of doing it within Google, what would be the best way of doing this? Can it be done with mod-rewrite? Will I have to go through every place that a url is generated and just 'strtolower' it?
Anyone done this sort of thing already or have any suggestions?
Cheers.
Keeop
Hi,
It must be because the links are in different files - (per merchant you would never have teh same link in the same sitemap) so Google is only warning about duplication of essentially the same URL in one sitemap file - in other words it is ignoring case...
Cheers,
David.
Hi Keeop,
Sounds like the duplicate pages have been found as a result of 2 different merchants using slightly different case for the same product name. A search for V1520 would group the items in the search result generating only one link; but of course the sitemap is generated "per merchant", which is how Google is discovering both versions.
I've not seen this error before, and it would certainly apply to lots of my personal sites if it were not simply a case issue - in other words the warning is regarding a different URL (by case) leading to an identical page.
If manageable, I would actually suggest using Product Mapping to match up the product name for equivalent products like this. Alternatively, the Name Case filter applied to the product name could help...
Otherwise, strtolower'ing all instances where a productHREF is generated would do the trick - it's not in too many places, essentially just search.php, products.php, reviews.php, and of course sitemap.php...
Cheers,
David.