Multiple Paths showing up for Each Page

[emzeegee]

Much of my site is ASP pages, some of which are DB driven, some of which aren't.

I recently bought the SEO administrator toolset and am happily surprised by some of its features. Their HTML Analyzing Tool has left me a little worried though.

As you know, in ASP, quotation marks around link urls or tag features can pose a problem sometimes. There are generally two alternatives.. Using \" to set apart that tag feature or simply using a ' instead.

I've been inconsistant with my usage and when I ran the HTML analyzing tool, it 'found' roughly twice as many pages in my site than I was expecting to see!

This was because it was counting

www.domain.com/index.asp and
www.domain.com/'/index.asp'

as two different pages. They both take you to the same page and work fine, but it didn't recognize them as one page. This relative link problem is affecting more than half of my major pages and I didn't realize it until now.

Two questions

Is this really even a problem? Could this be hurting my internal link structure in the eyes of the search engines?

If so, how would you recommend fixing this?

Thanks a bunch.

Marc

[Robert_Charlton]

Is this really even a problem?

Yes... it could be a major problem.


...it was counting

www.domain.com/index.asp and
www.domain.com/'/index.asp'

as two different pages.

I'll bet you also have the following variants for your default home page...

http://www.domain.com/
http://domain.com/
http://domain.com/index.asp
http://domain.com/'/index.asp'

etc etc...

You never want to have the same content appear under more than one url. The engines don't like it, and the situation will get increasingly confused as the variants gain their own inbound links.

All of the engines treat this as dupe content, and they treat it differently... but generally the page with the highest PageRank wins and the rest disappear. Unfortunately, you often don't have control over what stays and what drops out.

If so, how would you recommend fixing this?...

First, clean up your code. And replace your nav links to "index.asp" with links to "/" or to the preferred canonical of your domain. Keep your linking consistent.

If your variants have garnered inbound links, you may have to do some rewrites as well. I don't know anything about rewrites in asp, but someone else may be able to help.

My answer is just skimming the surface of what needs to be done. Maybe others can jump in.

Also... is your site a form driven site with many possible variants of a page?