@bingoadvantage 235701 wrote:
There is a specific meta tag designed for this situation. http://www.site.com/article” /> <-- this tells the search engines which is the correct page to index but i am unsure if it stops the alternate versions from bleeding link juice or factoring in other ways Regarding the robots.txt The problem is that the robots entry will stop the robots from visiting that page but it will still factor into things in a number of other ways. IMO your best solution, if possible, 301 redirect the /home/article pages to the /article pages. In theory you pass any pagerank and keyword relevance to the correct page this way as well.
Agree with bingo advantage here. Go the canonical URL route. It allows all your pages to be spidered – and allows your “main” page with the “duplicate” content to still be the only existence in google serps.
I ran into similar problems with wordpress a while back where my category page was ranking high then the actual article itself – canonical urls made sure that the article was the page that ranked in serps.