Gossamer Forum: Products: Gossamer Links: Discussions: Avoiding Duplicate Content with Title Changes

Apr 8, 2014, 7:50 AM

meso

Novice (42 posts)

Apr 8, 2014, 7:50 AM

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Avoiding Duplicate Content with Title Changes

I'm not sure if this topic has been addressed in the past, but after doing some searching on the forums, I couldn't find anything relevant to my interests.

We've got the problem of creating internal content and then needing to change the title of the article a few days later at times. The problem comes in, in that when we make a change to the title of an article, it then creates duplicate content in that the old URL (based off the old title) remains, and the new URL (with the new title) is also created and indexed. This is obviously very undesirable for SEO purposes.

Are there any solutions, perhaps plugins or work arounds that would best solve this problem. We want to stray from using 301 redirects and instead find a way for the URL to act independently from the Title field. So that when we make a change to the Title, the URL is unaffected.

The concept would be similar to that of the permalinks feature in wordpress. We would be able to change both the URL link and the title text independently, and not have to worry about duplicate content being created.

Any ideas?

Cheers
Bryn

Apr 8, 2014, 7:54 AM

Andy

Veteran / Moderator (18441 posts)

Apr 8, 2014, 7:54 AM

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Re: [meso] Avoiding Duplicate Content with Title Changes In reply to

You could certainly do this. In your links table, add a new field called "SEO_Detailed_URL", as a CHAR(255). Once you have updated this value for all your links - you can change the setting:

Setup > Build Options > build_detail_format

Set it to "Custom", with a value of %SEO_Detailed_URL%

That should then make all your <%detailed_url%> values, use the SEO_Detailed_URL field

Hope that helps!

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

May 7, 2014, 11:18 PM

meso

Novice (42 posts)

May 7, 2014, 11:18 PM

Post #3 of 4

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HEyRe: [Andy] Avoiding Duplicate Content with Title Changes In reply to

Hey,

Thanks once again Andy... This seems simple enough.

There is one concern though, we have hundreds and hundreds of links and going and changing each one with a new custom URL would take a lot of time and be rather tedious.

Is there a way in which we could create it so that if there is a value in the new SEO field, it will use that - but if not, it will use the default. For example, at the moment we have a single article which is of high importance to us, and we'd like it to use a custom URL - while having the rest of the articles, at least for the moment, remain how they are.

May 7, 2014, 11:31 PM

Andy

Veteran / Moderator (18441 posts)

May 7, 2014, 11:31 PM

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Re: [meso] HEyRe: [Andy] Avoiding Duplicate Content with Title Changes In reply to

Hi,

Unfortunately, I'm afraid not. You're best option, would be a little script that runs through and updates that field with a pre-made version of the URL (the current URL).

Code:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl 

    use strict; 
    use lib '/path/to/admin'; 
    use Links qw/$IN $DB $CFG $USER/; 
    use GT::SQL; 
    use POSIX qw(ceil); 

    local $SIG{__DIE__}  = \&Links::fatal; 

    Links::init('/path/to/admin/admin'); 

    my $sth = $DB->table("Links")->select( ['ID'] ); 

    while (my $hit = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) {    
        my $detailed_url = $DB->table("Links")->detailed_url( $hit->{ID} ); 
        $DB->table("Links")->update( { SEO_Detailed_URL => $detailed_url }, { ID => $hit->{ID} }) || die $GT::SQL::error; 
    }   

    print "Done... ";

Just run that from SSH, and it should update for you.

The only downside of using that field for the URL - is that it means you need to remember to manually update it when you validate/add a new link. Alternatively, you could do it with a little plugin, but I'm afraid I don't have time to write that ATM :)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk