Does Matt Cutts have a URL canonicalisation problem?

by richardbaxterseo on July 16, 2008

This morning I’ve been conduction some research on class attributes that control search engine indexing, such as Yahoo’s no-content attribute.

Along the way I though I’d check Matt’s blog to see if Google have recently commented on the use of robots-nocontent so I performed this query to see if he had much content on the subject.

The results were pretty cool, but not in the way I had expected! Matt Cutts himself has duplicate search results with a non canonical form URL:

matt cutts google search results for robots-nocontent

When you test the urls, for some reason Matt’s category and blog post urls don’t add / remove a trailing forward slash “/” via a 301 redirect though the main url (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog) does.

So, Matt, fess up! Are you still using your blog as a test case for canonicalisation issues, or is there something wrong with some of your .htaccess rules?

Heads up! :-)

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Matt Cutts July 16, 2008 at 6:09 pm

I make a great guinea pig! :)

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2 richardbaxterseo July 16, 2008 at 6:16 pm

Hi Matt, thanks for dropping by! I see you’ve fixed it, fast work :-)

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3 Catfish July 16, 2008 at 8:17 pm

I will say that ever since Big Daddy Google has gotten much better at these issues although situations like this still occur. Yahoo is so so at canonicalization issues and MSN is HORRIBLE. Another common situation that can cause this is the indiscriminate use of capital letters in your URL strings.

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4 Joe July 17, 2008 at 7:01 am

Here is another example of big fish doing the same…

http://www.seomoz.org/blog and
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/

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