How to fix duplicate content for homepage and index.html
-
Hello,
I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.
Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page).
According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical
I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above.
Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!
-
OK, Paul, I hear what you are saying. It's a very open and obvious diss.
I'm not sure what you are saying makes any difference to the argument that the canonical way here is not the way to go. I was explaining in the simplest way, I would not want, and I'm sure you would not want either, a live page like this - the home page, live and canonicalised.
(It's a given that the canonical works like a 301, passing link juice to the preferred version.)
So thanks but it makes no difference - delete & 301 every time.
Google is heightening its distrust of canonicals - the new Seach Console tool reveals which pages are the preferred canonical and it's something of a surprise to SEOs!
If you feel like playing top trumps again then why not PM me? - it's so much better and the uninitiated do not need to see it!
Cheers Nigel
-
A proper canonical tag does a lot more than "just be telling Google not to rank it" When used properly (i.e. pages that truly do contain the same content), the canonicalised page passes its ranking signals back to the canonical source.
I agree with Kristina - while a 301 would be preferable (it's a directive, while canonical tags are taken as suggestions), a canonical tag would be vastly better than not doing anything about the issue. At least until the dev can get the problem with the 301-redirect properly resolved.
Paul
-
It's best practice to redirect, but if that's not an option, the canonical route should help the problem a lot! You'll probably lose some link equity with this route, but it should clear up duplicate content issues from Google's side.
-
Hi Dre
If you just do a canonical then the page will still be live, you will just be telling Google not to rank it. Best practice is to remove it all together and 301. It is bad practice having more than one version of your home page, (any page) live!
Regards Nigel
-
Thank you so much for all the responses. So it sounds like 301 redirect through htaccess is the way to go. What is the difference between using the 301 through htaccess vs using rel=canonical in my case? Does the 301 provide better link juice vs rel=canonical or is canonical just not applicable in this case? Thanks for all the replies and helpful suggestions again!
EDIT: I spoke to my developer (who is hosting and maintaining my site now).. he said he tried to do 301 through htaccess but it seems to be crashing the site (and trust me he is very good at what he does). Part of the problem is that my site is VERY old (originally build about 10 years ago and NOT updated once since).. he has been slowly updating and cleaning up the site slowly and he will try to figure out why the 301 is crashing the site and not working but in the mean time how safe is it to use rel=canonical instead of a 301?
Thanks again!
-
Hi dre
Your site really shouldn't be generating an index.html in the first place but if it is you must make sure that there is a 301 in the htaccess file sending all traffic to the single homepage URL as Lynn correctly points out this will be a permanent redirect.
It is very simple to do. Both versions are treated as separate pages (as http and https) so you are essentially showing a duplicate site to Google so your rankings will be terrible until you change.
Regards Nigel
-
Hello there,
You can use .htaccess URL rewrite to remove all the .html from your URL, here's the rewrite rules.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]Once you added this rules you should also fix all your internal links make sure they link to the URL without .html
Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap
-
"I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page" - great! Also, you should check if your inner pages redirecting from HTTP-versions to HTTPS too.
index.html should redirect to the homepage main version with 301 Permanent Redirect.
-
Google consider HTTP and HTTPS as two separate protocols. Since the contents are same on both versions, google bots consider it as duplicate content. Adding a canonical URL will solve this problem. If you have any doubts, feel free to ask.
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
-
Does hover over content index well
i notice increasing cases of portfolio style boxes on site designs (especially wordpress templates) where you have an image and text appears after hover over (sorry for my basic terminology). does this text which appears after hover over have much search engine value or as it doesnt immediately appear on pageload does it carry slightly less weight like tabbed content? any advice appreciated thanks neil
On-Page Optimization | | neilhenderson0 -
Duplicate Content
I run a Business Directory, Where all the businesses are listed. I am having an issue.. with Duplication content. I have categories, Like A, B, C Now a business in Category A, User can filter it by different locations, by State, City, Area So If they filter it by the State and the State has 10 businesses and all of them are in one City. Both of the page
On-Page Optimization | | Adnan4SEO
The state filtered and the city filtered are same, What can i do to avoid that? canonical-url-tag or changing page Meta's and Body text? Please help 🙂0 -
Would you consider this to be thin content
I always struggle with these pages I have on my site going back and forth debating what I want to do with them. On one side Google was content, yet at the same time its all about user experience. http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-that-start-with/letter/h/ I used to have all my words listed on one page which could have been well over 10,000. Now I pagination them as you can see. I debate writing a header of content for these pages, but honestly users just want the words. Get in, get what you need and get out. What is the recommendation on these pages. Should I write content? Should I not?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Duplicate page titles and Content in Woocommerce
Hi Guys, I'm new to Moz and really liking it so far!
On-Page Optimization | | jeeyer
I run a eCommerce site on Wordpress + WooCommerce and ofcourse use Yoast for SEO optimalisation I've got a question about my first Crawl report which showed over 600 issues! 😐 I've read that this is something that happens more often (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). Most of them are categorized under:
1. Duplicate Page Titles or;
2. Duplicate Page Content. Duplicate Page Titles:
These are almost only: product category pages and product tags. Is this problem beeing solved by giving them the right SEO SERP? I see that a lot of categories don't have a proper SEO SERP set up in yoast! Do I need to add this to clear this issue, or do I need to change the actual Title? And how about the Product tags? Another point (bit more off-topic) I've read here: http://moz.com/community/q/yoast-seo-plugin-to-index-or-not-to-index-categories that it's advised to noindex/follow Categories and Tags but isn't that a wierd idea to do for a eCommerce site?! Duplicate Page Content:
Same goes here almost only Product Categories and product tags that are displayed as duplicate Page content! When I check the results I can click on a blue button for example "+ 17 duplicates" and that shows me (in this case 17 URLS) but they are not related to the fist in any way so not sure where to start here? Thanks for taking the time to help out!
Joost0 -
How do I fix duplicate page issue on Shopify with duplicate products because of collections.
I'm working with a new client with a site built on Shopify. Most of their products appear in four collections. This is creating a duplicate content challenge for us. Can anyone suggest specific code to add to resolve this problem. I'm also interested in other ideas solutions, such as "don't use collections" if that's the best approach. I appreciate your insights. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | quiltedkoala0 -
Duplicate Pages software
Hey guys, i was told few hours ago about a system that can take few of your keywords and automatically will create new links and pages (in the map file) for your website, so a website that was build with 20 pages( for example) will be shown to SE as a site with hundreds of pages, thing that should help the SEO IS anyone heard about such a software? is it legal? any advice that you can give on this mater? Thanks i.
On-Page Optimization | | iivgi0 -
301 redirected Duplicate Content, still showing up as duplicate after new crawl.
We launched a site where key landing pages were not showing up in google. After running the seomoz crawl it returned a lot of duplicate pages which may expalin this. The actual url of the page is /design and it was telling me the following were dupes: /design/family-garden-design
On-Page Optimization | | iterate
/design/small-garden-design
/design/large-rural-garden-design
/Design All of these URL's were in fact pointing to the /design landing page. I 301 redirected all of the pages so they all now resolve to /design After running another crawl the day after doing this it's still showing up as duplicate content on seomoz. Does seomoz evaluate the new changes right away?0 -
Duplicate Product BUT Unique Content -- any issues?
We have the situation where a group of products fit into 2 different categories and also serve different purposes (to the customer). Essentially, we want to have the same product duplicated on the site, but with unique content and it would even have a slightly different product name. Some specifications would be redundant, but the core content would be different. Any issues?
On-Page Optimization | | SEOPA1