Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for webmasters. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
My programer has made my website in Cold Fusion and the URLs are like
http://www.example.com/article.cfm/articleid/12345/seo-keyword-title
but the problem is the page opens even if the (seo-keyword-title) part is changed
http://www.example.com/article.cfm/articleid/12345/gibberish-keyword-title
http://www.example.com/article.cfm/articleid/12345/gibberish-blah-blah
because of which I'm facing a canonical URL problem.
Is there a way to stop them from opening on those URLs?
This is going to be an issue within the ColdFusion programming itself. From the sounds of it the programmer has set up the application to work only with the first two slashed parameters, articleid is saying that the article should be looked up by the article id, the following slashed parameter (12345) is the article ID and is being used to select the article to show. The remainder of the URL with the seo keyword title is not used at this point to identify the article and so functionally is doing nothing for selecting the article and instead is only being used for SEO reasons. Because of this it could be quite easy to get duplicate content penalties without meaning to.
Best thing to do here would be to change the programming of the site and get rid of the article id section of the URL so instead of being http://www.example.com/article.cfm/articleid/12345/seo-keyword-title best thing would be to rewrite it so that the URL instead is http://www.example.com/seo-keyword-title. This would involve a change to the code so that the seo-keyword-title section is unique within the database and indexed so you can pull the article based on the title (which should be unique anyway) and would involve setting up rewrite rules on the ColdFusion server so that every request is funneled through the article.cfm page. How to do this is beyond the scope of webmastering on this site and more to do with programming but any half way decet ColdFusion programmer would be able to do this in a reasonably small amount of time.
