Does using Symlink (or weblink) hurt SEO (duplicate content)

Hi, I'm curious to know if using symlink or weblink causes duplicate content which might be bad for SEO. If so, what can I do to let Google know it is the same content?

Hi Michelle - symlinks could cause a duplicate content issue as they are showing the same content under different urls. But you can get around that by including a canonical tag in your template header and have it point to the original content:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Aha, thanks! Now I understand!

You can also use a weblink. A weblink simply forwards the user to the target URL. That would prevent any penalty for duplicate content.

If you are doing this to redirect from an old page to a new one, you can also put a 301 (moved permanently) redirect in your .htaccess file to forward people to the new one.

Thanks for your reply Bob! I want to use it to provide a quick way to access an special resource, but the resource should also be reachable on the regular URL. The regular URL is just quite long and not useful to communicate to customers.

Which one would be best in this case? weblink or symlink?

You could just change the alias to something shorter.

Otherwise, I think a weblink, though a redirect in .htaccess would get the users to the page faster, though I think it would prevent the shorter URL from being indexed.

If the site is new, you might also consider setting the use_alias_path System Setting to 'no'. That will give you shorter aliases throughout the site and let you reorganize the site without changing all the URLs.