Shortcuts and double rankings

Many Websites does offer shortened versions of some of the URLs to some of the most favorite locations on their sites.

This is of course good, especially for accessibility from hand held devices, but it does have some downsizes when it comes to search engines.

People does not always know where they are supposed to link, so they will just link to to any URL they can find that will point users to the right page on your Website. This will of course make everyone happy… Except the Website owner and search engines, that is.

Having a variety of URLs pointing to the same Webpage will probably make search engines include the same page multiple times. And in rare occasions search engines will block the pages entirely as they think they are dealing with junk content (or spam). The classical example of single getting to separate rankings due to two URLs are the www. problem.

The easiest way to avoid the problems, but retain the shortcuts and the current multiple URL schema is to decide which URL is the most permanent and set up 301 Moved Permanently redirects from all other locations. This way machines and users will all get the right address and live happily on ever after.

Notably Apache powered Web servers tend to slow down page rendering if there are many 301 redirects in the picture. So do try and keep the path to the content as direct as possible.