A crawl revealed two home pages
-
After doing a site crawl using the moz tool, I have found two home pages-www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com. Both URLS have the exact same metrics and I have set a preferred domain name in google, will this hurt seo? Should I claim the www.domain.com/ as well as www.domain.com and domain.com in the search console?
Thanks
-
you guys are awesome! Thank you.
-
Just double check in a clean browser (with history cleared & F5) or in incognito mode to check the default.
Sounds good Tom!
-
Thanks Niglel, after doing a little investigating, I believe google search console may have added in the backslash for formatting reasons. It appears with a backslash in home view, where you can see domains, however when viewing preferred domain, it does not appear with a backslash. To test this I used a practice site and added it in without a backslash, following my submission google added in a backslash under the domain view.
So I should be set?
Thanks!
-
Hi Tom
It will still be there but will slowly decline as the new format one takes over. You won't lose anything, GSC just tracks. You will see the non-trailing slash data begin to populate over the next few weeks.
Regards
Nigel
-
Thanks Nigel, what will happen to the existing data under the view of the current preferred domain with the backslash if I switch the preferred domain to no backslash? I worry that the existing data will be erased or not transferred.
-
Hi Tom
If it redirects to www.domain.com then that must also be set up in GSC as that is now the preferred domain format. It looks better as well without the trailing slash.
Regards
Nigel
-
Thank you for the fast responses.
Currently, "www.domain.com/" has been claimed and set as preferred, all search console data appears on this account. (www and backslash)
"domain.com/" has also been claimed, with no data on this view.---(non www)
However, as stated, "www.domain.com/" (Preferred and with backslash) redirects to www.domain.com. So as per suggestions I should add "www.domain.com", should this now be my preferred domain?
Thanks guys!
-
Hi Tom
Moz will not reveal a 301 unless there is a nasty redirect chain. If you use Screaming Frog it will reveal all the directives for every page.
There must be a redirect but it might be worth checking if it's a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) - it should be 301.
The good news is that it is redirecting.
As Martijn suggests you should add the preferred one to Search Console. It doesn't 'do' anything but you will be able to see both versions.
Regards Nigel
-
We are currently HTTP, however the page domain.com/ seems to redirect to domain.com, as I can not access domain.com/ without it bringing me to domain.com (sorry for the redundancy). However, the moz crawl did not reveal a 301. Does this resolve the duplicate content issue? Thanks for the fast answers.
-So far www and non www have been claimed only.
-
In addition to what Nigel is suggesting I would also recommend to claim www.example.com and example.com, if you used to have a HTTP site and have moved over the last years to HTTPS I would recommend using that to verify as well. All of this gives you the best insight.
This is only worth fixing as it's usually an easy change that needs to be made, right now it won't hurt you as there are so many other issues that have way more weight for a search engine. This particular one is one that millions of sites have.
-
Hi Profitect
These are two separate home pages and duplicate each other so do have the potential to kill all of your SEO efforts as they are seen as separate pages by Google.
You will need to put a directive in the htaccess file to move all traffic to one of the other. It's a two-minute job for a developer.
This would move all URL's to a trailing sash format. (Assuming the site is https)
<code><ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$ #Force Trailing slash RewriteRule ^((.*)[^/])$ $1/ [L,R=301]</ifmodule></code>
Regards
Nigel
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
-
Crawl solutions for landing pages that don't contain a robots.txt file?
My site (www.nomader.com) is currently built on Instapage, which does not offer the ability to add a robots.txt file. I plan to migrate to a Shopify site in the coming months, but for now the Instapage site is my primary website. In the interim, would you suggest that I manually request a Google crawl through the search console tool? If so, how often? Any other suggestions for countering this Meta Noindex issue?
Technical SEO | | Nomader1 -
Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as: /latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface and /component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface The latter being the duplicate. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO! I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail. Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
Technical SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
X-cart page crawling question.
I have an x-cart site and it is showing only 1 page being crawled. I'm a newbie, is this common? Can it be changed? If so, how? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SteveLMCG0 -
Home page deindexed by google
when I search my website on google by site:www.mydomain.com I have found my domain with www has been de-indexed by google, but when I search site:mydomain.com, my home page--**mydomain.com **show up on the search results without www, put it simple, google only index my domain without www, I wonder how to make my domain with www being indexed, and how to prevent this problem occure again.
Technical SEO | | semer0 -
2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?
I am working on a site that has a home page containing 2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link. I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored. This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page..... Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page?? Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site 🙂
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
3 pages crawled?
For some reason, my account says it only crawled 3 pages this week, where its usually about 3K. This is my robots which shouldnt affect http://www.theprinterdepo.com/robots.txt and this is my site http://www.theprinterdepo.com any idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
2 home page domains causing split in link juice
We have 2 home page domains that are resulting in a split in links. We have mysite.com and mysite.com/index.php. The site is on Joomla and when we try and re-direct the /index.php to just mysite.com is causing an infinite loop. I have done this on other platforms with no problems - is this an issue because of Joomla? How can we complete a 301 re-direct to consolidate our link juice to one domain url?
Technical SEO | | devonkrusich0