Thread

I can’t get my head around wether the following is a duplicate content issue or not, but I suspect that it is.

I’ve instructed EE to redirect certain templates to the homepage based on the member group of the current user. EE performs the redirect by changing the content but not the URL with a status code of 200OK.

E.g. for non-logged in members visiting the following 2 pages:

http://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/members

The two urls will resolve to exactly the same content (the homepage in my example)

I guess the question is, will the engines ever find /members. I think that there is a chance that they will, and this is therefore a potential duplicate content issue. I could have dozens of pages all pointing to my homepage!

Dominic,

you could add a disallow to your robots.txt for the members segment.
That would stop Google indexing it

Good idea, although it’s a work around. Wouldn’t it be better for EE to 301?

Hi, dominickelly -

In some cases a 301 might be preferable; but it’s not an option out of the box, so you’d need to roll your own solution in this case.

Using a robots.txt isn’t something I’d call a workaround; if you don’t want something indexed, then robots.txt is the best solution.

Redirect Helper might be a good option in this case as well.