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Eliminating Duplicate Home-Page Variants Caused by Garbage Slash and Query Patterns

Duplicate pages are not always neat alias copies. Sometimes they are malformed path variants that should have ended in a 404 but still resolve to valid content.

Even after fixing normal alias duplicates, some Evolution sites still expose strange URL variants such as repeated slashes, punctuation-heavy tails, or path fragments that resolve to the home page instead of a 404. These are SEO duplicates just as surely as cleaner alternate URLs.

What usually fixes it

  • normalize repeated slashes before routing continues
  • reject obviously malformed paths early with a 404
  • make sure the router does not quietly fall back to the homepage for invalid requests
  • pair the routing fix with a canonical strategy for valid URLs

If a malformed request still lands on real content, search engines see that as a duplicate route. Treat path normalization as part of technical SEO, not just URL hygiene.

Newer post

What an Intermittent Blank Resource Editor Usually Means in Evolution CMS

How to think about manager edit panes that periodically go blank and then recover later without any obvious action.

Older post

Fixing E_DEPRECATED Notice Errors After Upgrading from Evolution 1.0.12 to 1.0.13

How to interpret E_DEPRECATED constant errors and header warnings that appear immediately after an Evolution CMS upgrade.