Hello! A website we recently launched has about 16 pages that are duplicated in the sitemap, with the addition of a “%20” added to the URL right between the parent directory and the page name.
I work with an SEO strategist who suggested we set canonical tags to these pages so they aren’t flagged as duplicate content, however, these pages don’t exist and I can’t figure out why this would happen.
Things I’ve tried to troubleshoot so far:
Search for 301 redirects for any extra spaces in the slug (I couldn’t find any)
Check for extra spaces in the slug of the collection list item (couldn’t find any)
Check the category collection list for extra spaces (couldn’t find any)
Has anyone seen this issue before? Any troubleshooting tips are much appreciated! Thank you.
I’d never noticed this before, but when you have extra leading or trailing spaces on the collection-item slug part of a path, Webflow trims it and still delivers the slug-matched content, e.g.
/services/%20%20airway-orthodontics%20%20
delivers the same results as-
/services/airway-orthodontics
That’s a nice convenience to catch link typos, because afaik you cannot have spaces in CMS slugs. However it’s not redirecting, it’s rewriting- which seems unorthodox. I’d consider that a design oversight because it means the URL and the canonical won’t match, and if you change the slug, the %20 path will likely no longer work unless you specifically add those redirect variations as well. Note that I haven’t run those tests.
In your case, I’m not seeing any %20’s in your sitemap, so the %20 is most likely in a link that’s pointing to your page. It might be on your site, or from anywhere else, and if your SEO person is looking at analytics reports it will still likely be picked up and show as a valid URL.
Set your canonical in your site level settings as https://www.dentalhealingarts.com
That will resolve any duplicate content confusion- at the same time I’d probably want to trace down that link and correct it although it’s likely not causing any issues outside of your GA4 reports.
This was exactly it, thank you! We found these links within the content and removed the spaces. And also set the global canonical tag. Much appreciated!