Duplicate Content aka 301 redirect from .com to .com/index.html
-
Moz reports are telling me that I have duplicate content on the home page because .com and .com/index.html are being seen as two pages. I have implemented 301 redirect using various codes I found online, but nothing seems to work. Currently I'm using this code.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^jacksonvilleacservice.com
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ [L,R=301]Nothing is changing. What am I doing wrong? I have given it several weeks but report stays the same. Also according to webmasters tools they can't see this as duplicate content. What am I doing wrong?
-
Thank you very much. I have implemented your suggestions and we'll see how it goes. Thanks again.
-
All of the answers here have pretty much outlined what you should do in this situation, but I thought I'd sum it all up here:
-
You probably don't need to redirect /index.html to www.jacksonvilleacservice.com of the website for the homepage, since it can be tricky. Instead, make sure that:
-
All internal links pointing to the homepage go to ttp://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com rather than the /index.html page
-
The homepage canonicals to the www.jacksonvilleacservice.com with_out_ the /index.html
-
If you want to be doubly sure, you can use the code Doug provided.
-
Other commenters have also noticed, a potentially bigger issue is that you're creating two copies of your site by allowing visitors to reach your site with or without a "www" before the URL. For that you will need to create a 301 redirect, and you should canonical to be doubly sure.
Good luck!
-
-
My preference tends to be to redirect such pages to the domain rather than the other way round. You'll find that people naturally link to the domain (without the path) so making that the canonical version makes sense. It also means that you can future-proof your site somewhat. (What happens when your change the content management system and instead of an index.html for your home page, you've not got an index.php page...)
So, my recommendation would be to make sure that all internal links to the home page on your own site point to http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ and set up a redirect from the index.html to the domain.
Then you'd use something like the following to redirect the index.html to the main page:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]Another tool to check your headers and that your redirects are in place is: http://web-sniffer.net/
It also appears that you've got a problem with both the www and non-www versions of the page responsing with a 200 response code.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]If you look at your inbound links using Open Site Explorer, you'll see that you've got a mix of links pointing to either http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ or http://jacksonvilleacservice.com/.
(There don't appear to be any external links show in OSE linking to your /index.html page)
-
Ok, first thing let’s not reply on report only and check some online 301 redirection checker to see if your redirection code is working or not! Here is a tool by SEObook that allows you to check the header status of any URL http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/
Redirection code is very much depends upon what website are you using like PHP, wordpress, ASP or anything else the redirection code will be different as PHP and ASP are different languages and for WP there are tons of plugins that can do your work!
My advice would be to search for “how to redirect (website’s language)” and I am sure there will be some articles that have explained the step by step process. Hope this helps!
Hope this helps!
-
A 301 redirect for this can be tricky, as the other responses have said in this thread, it can create an infinite redirect loop. I'm pretty sure it can be done, but I don't have enough technical know-how to tell you what's wrong with your conf code there.
A simple way around this is to put a rel=canonical tag in the of your home page, pointing at your root directory (i.e. "/"). You can include this in the in the file, so it'll show up when the page is accessed under both / and for /index.html. The HTML for this would look like: . Make sure your internal links point to the canonical version, as this method may lose you a little pagerank (pagerank coming from /index.html to /).
You have a canonicalization problem for your subdomain too... meaning you're serving the same content for both http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com (with www) and http://jacksonvilleacservice.com (without www). I'd pick one, and then do 301 redirects from one to the other, rather than solving that issue with canonical tags.
-
I agree with Eric it would be a good idea to link to your root domain and not the specific file. You can just link to yourdomain.com or build your links to your homepage using code similar to the following: Home.
I have also seen instances where yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are treated as separate pages and cause similar problems. It appears you are using www.yourdomain.com so while you are messing with 301 redirects you might want to add one from yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com for all URLs in case a link is made to yourdomain.com.
-
Since index.html is most likely your home page (it's the default home page on your web server), then you really don't need to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect in this situation. The only thing you need to do is make sure that on your website you don't have any links pointing to www.yourdomain.com/index.html. Rather, all of those links should be pointing to www.yourdomain.com as the home page.
If you set up a redirect from index.html to your site's home page www.domain.com then you'll probably create a "loop" that won't work. If you find all the links to /index.html and fix those then that will be enough to take care of this.
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
-
Will I have duplicate content on my own website?
Hello Moz community, We are an agency providing services to various industries, and among them the hair salon industry. On our website, we have our different service pages in the main menu, as usual. These service pages are general information and apply to any industry.We also have a page on the website that is only intended for the hair salon industry. On this page, we would like to link new service pages: they will be the same services as our “general” services, but specialized for hair salons. My questions relate to duplicate content: Do we have to make the new individual service pages for hair salons with completely different text, even though it’s the same service, in order to avoid having duplicate content? Can we just change a few words from the “general service” page to specifically target hair salons, and somehow avoid Google seeing it as duplicate content? Reminder that these pages will be internal links inside of the hair salon industry page. Thank you in advance for your answers, Gaël
On-Page Optimization | | Gael_Regnault0 -
Duplicate Content and Other Issues from Blog Tags and Categories
I have recently taken over the maintenance/redesign of our website and after setting up Moz I see many errors:
On-Page Optimization | | jgoethert
Duplicate content
Missing descriptions
Duplicate titles
etc. All are related to blog categories and tags. My questions are: are these errors hurting us? Should I simply remove tags/categories from the sitemaps or bite the bullet and create content for every single category page? Our site is https://financiallysimple.com/ and we are using Yoast plugin in Wordpress (if that helps)2 -
How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having aggregated content or duplicate content
How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having duplicate content. I mean somewhere google says they will prefer original content & will give preference to them who have original content but this statement contradict when I see Indeed.com as they aggregate content from other sites but still rank higher than original content provider side. How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having aggregated content or duplicate content
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
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 -
Duplicate content errors
I have multiple duplicate content errors in my crawl diagnostics. The problem is though that i already took care of these problems with the canonical tag but MOZ keeps saying there is a problem. For example this page http://www.letspump.dk/produkter/56-aminosyre/ has a canonical tag, but moz still says it has an error. Why is that?
On-Page Optimization | | toejklemme0 -
Losing Page Rank after 301 redirect from http to www
Hi Guys I have site-wide redirected all http// to www and all the category pages lost their page ranks (except home page). I would like to know if this is normal and is it one of the possible causes in losing keyword ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | ilovebodykits0 -
How Can I Fix Adobe Bridge Photo Galleries and Duplicate Content?
I have used the Adobe bridge program for a number of photo galleries on a remodeling site and it is showing a large amount of duplicate titles, etc. Is there an easy fix to this? anyone?
On-Page Optimization | | DaveBrown3330 -
301 redirect OK for a newer version of a page that is a different url?
I have about 500 products with multiple urls for the same product, but different versions. I sell wine and have a different page for each vintage. I've decided that is not the best way to go, and want to point the older vintage pages to the latest version page, and make that the only page for the product as time goes on. Do I have to put a link in the text from each older page to the newer, or can I use a 301 to redirect them to the new page? I don't want google to think I'm pulling something funny.
On-Page Optimization | | JeanYates0