Multiple URLs - What are they?

Posted by System | Friday, November 28, 2008

Have you ever heard the saying do not put all of your eggs into one basket?

However with your website this is exactly what you want to do!

When promoting a page on your web site you need to make sure that all of your internal and external links to your site point to just one URL. This will allow links to combine together allowing more link juice to flow into one URL.

The most common example of this is found in home page URL’s. This is an example of a multiple URL:

http://www.illusionmedia.co.uk/

http://www.illusionmedia.co.uk/index.html

Both internal and external links should be directed to one same URL. You will find that if it is spilt between two or more URLs the page rank will also split into two separate pages, and your goal is to have a higher page rank for just one.

With the evolvement of search engines they can now recognise and filter out duplicate content on a page and will drop one from their listings as years ago black hat techniques worked against the basket rule as they would create more URLs to dominate search results.

The fix for the common example of the home page URL is to simply ensure all your internal navigation points to the same URL and then sweep up any external links that point to the old URL with a redirect. This is why redirects are so important.

Therefore, by having one URL for each page, there is no confusion where external sites link to, giving the site optimum page relevancy and increased chances of rankings.

It goes to show that some old proverbs don’t always work. Especially when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation.