Duplicate Homepage In Google
-
Hi
Just found through my SEO dashboard, Google has two versions of the same homepage, the root page, plus the index.html page, causing duplicate content from both the pages.
what is the best option to ensure google only have 1 version of the homepage listed?
-
I'm not a big fan of doubling-up on canonicalization tactics, because there's no good way to tell what's working. The 301 is probably a tiny bit stronger (not much, in my experience), but the advantage of the canonical tag on the home-page is that one tag will sweep up any variants. If you 301 "index.html" to the root, and then someone comes along and uses the non-www version of your home-page or adds a tracking parameter ("index.html?track=1234"), etc., the 301 won't do anything - you'll have to create 301s for each situation. The canonical will prevent those problems, which are very common on home pages.
-
Correct - usually, it's all the same physical page (on the server), so you only need to put it in one place.
-
Hi
just found I have same issues on my own website. However bit confused how I would change this. When the website was developed they where php pages, we did a rewrite so these pages went to .html pages instead, see file below. However now with my website www.rfksolutions.co.uk and www.rfksolutions.co.uk/index.html seem to be duplicate?
see my current htaccess file
any ideas?
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^index.html$ index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^about-us.html$ about-us.php [L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio.html$ portfolio.php [L]
RewriteRule ^partners.html$ partners.php [L]
RewriteRule ^logo-design-portfolio.html$ logo-design-portfolio.php [L]
RewriteRule ^graphic-design-portfolio.html$ graphic-design-portfolio.php [L]
RewriteRule ^graphic-design-portfolio2.html$ graphic-design-portfolio2.php [L]
RewriteRule ^testimonials.html$ testimonials.php [L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio/([0-9a-zA-Z_-]+).html$ portfolio_details.php?&title=$1 [L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^rfksolutions.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.rfksolutions.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ "http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk" [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^falkirkwebdesign.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.falkirkwebdesign.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk/$1" [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^falkirkwebdesigners.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.falkirkwebdesigners.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk/$1" [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^webdesignfalkirk.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.webdesignfalkirk.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk/$1" [R=301,L] -
I am confused on when to use both 301 and rel=canonical at the same time and when to use each separately. I have received advice through other Q&As saying to use both for my homepage in this exact same scenario, but sometimes SEOs advise to use rel=canonical on every page to point to its same location.
If 301s pass along "most" of the link juice, then why use both? What's the disadvantage of just using a 301?
D
-
Good job, 301's are usually the reliable & trusted solution. Canonical tags are really useful for other redirecting purposes such as similar content issues. All the best
-
Hi
thanks for that, it was a 301 i was thinking about, that is what I would normally have done, if for instance an old page had some link juice I would 301 it to another page, but I hadnt done one for this reason
I have just setup a 301 now for the domain name
-
Hi There
There are a couple of options;
-
301 Redirect the index.html page to your root domain, e.g. http://example.com/index.html 301 redirected to http://example.com
-
Use a Canonical tag, pointing the index.html page to your root domain.
You'll find a really helpful Redirection Guide here on SEOmoz.
You can also find here on SEOmoz a useful guide to Canonical tags.
I'd almost always recommend for this particular scenario, opting for a 301 Redirect on the page index.html to your root domain. Chances are (for these two pages) your inbound links will tend to mainly point to your root domain rather than the index.html page.
I hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
-
-
thanks for your help, sorry just to confirm
if I wanted google to keep the www.mydomain.com instead of www.mydomain.com/index.html as the main homepage I would put the link rel= onto the index/html and put the www.mydomain.com in there?
-
Adding the canonical tag within your telling search engines which homepage to use - this seemed to work for us:
If you're having duplicate content throughout your site, I've read having your site admin do something with the htaccess file would do the trick.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Content
Crawl Diagnostics has returned several issues that I'm unsure how to fix. I'm guessing it's a canonical link issue but not entirely sure... Duplicate Page Content/Titles On a website (http://www.smselectronics.co.uk/market-sectors) with 6 market sectors but each pull the same 3 pages as child pages - certifications, equipment & case studies. On each products section where the page only shows X amount of items but there are several pages to fit all the products this creates multiple pages. There is also a similar pagination problem with the Blogs (auto generated date titles & user created SEO titles) & News listings. Blog Tags also seem to generate duplicate pages with the same content/titles as the parent page. Are these particularly important for SEO or is it more important to remove the duplication by deleting them? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | BBDCreative0 -
Image Duplication
I'm feeling strong! Ok, so can Google penalise a website which has "duplicated images" - coming from a completely independent website?
Technical SEO | | GaryVictory0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Google Places Question......
Hi Guys. I am working with a photographer they do not have a studio they shoot on location. However I noticed many photographers within their industry have their home address listed in their google places, and they too shoot on location. My client doesn't want their home address listed so I wondered what options there would be? Do you think renting mail forwarding address would suffice?
Technical SEO | | RankStealer0 -
How to resolve this Duplicate content?
Hi , There is page i get when i do proper menu navigation Caratlane.com>jewellery>rings>casualsrings> http://www.caratlane.com/jewellery/rings/casual-rings/leaves-dew-diamond-0-03-ct-peridot-1-ct-ring-18k-yellow-gold.html When i do a site search in my search box by my product code number "JR00219" The same page is appears with different url http://www.caratlane.com/leaves-dew-diamond-0-03-ct-peridot-1-ct-ring-18k-yellow-gold.html So there is a duplicate content. How can we resolve it. Regards, kathir caratlane.com
Technical SEO | | kathiravan0 -
How to improve my google backlinks
Hi i have just checked my google back links for my site www.in2town.co.uk and it has said that i have only five, not sure where these are from as the tool i was using did not tell me. But i have looked at my compeditors and they have a few hundred and some have thousands so i am just wondering what i need to do to compete and get more backlinks. I have been writing articles for other sites, free article sites hoping to get some traffic as well as backlinks, for this has not worked out. i just done a report now and i have got the following information DMOZ Directory ? NoYahoo Directory ? NoDigg 0 Yahoo Indexed Pages ? 0 Bing Indexed Pages 0 I would really like to know what steps i need to take as i feel that i have done a lot of good work but my back links are not improving. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How do I eliminate duplicate url, duplicate title issues using Joomla CMS?
We have a site using Joomla CMS, integrated with Jreviews and Jomsocial. Utilizing ACE SEF to generate Dynamic URL structure. Our issue is that we are recieving multiple instances of duplicate url's and duplicate titles due to the way joomla is working with jreviews for all our 7,000+ business listings. Site is already ranked for many broad/national keywords, concerned that our state and local rankings are limited by these errors. How can we prevent this from happening without re-writing the entire website?
Technical SEO | | mdmcn0 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gregster10001