Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Two home pages?
-
One of my campaigns shows duplicate page content for domain xxx and xxx/index. There is only one index (home) page, so why does it report on two?
-
I have replied to you inbox message.
-
PM me the site if you want and I'll take a look as it's difficult to say if without seeing it
-
Guys
I'm sorry. I'm probably either being a little dense here or I have not explained my predicament properly. I'm no techie, so excuse me and the following long explanation.
I've looked up 301 redirect and it suggests creating a .htaccess file with a line that points the old URL and file path to a new one. I don't have an actual file to point from or to other than the domain/index.html file.
I still don't understand why SEOMoz says I have duplicate content on TWO pages - xxx.co.uk and xxx.co.uk/index.html when I only have xxx.co.uk/index.html. I do not have any other home page for the website.
So, I guess I have a couple of questions:
1 - what line of code should be in my .htaccess file when I only have one file, not two.
2 - if I type xxx.co.uk into my browser's address bar, how does the browser know to take me to xxx.co.uk/index?
-
The campaign crawler will detect urls regardless of whether they are indexed of not, you should do as EssEEmily says and set up a 301 to the version with the most links if you haven't done already.
Oh and don't think just because one version isn't indexed now, it can still cause you problems down the road especially when linking is involved.
Also when setting up your redirects if you have a small number of links set it up regardless to the xxx/ version as this is the one most likely to be linked to.
-
Thanks very much. I'll take a look.
-
I'm sure someone on here can tell you the technical reason why index pages are created (I have just kind of accepted that they exist), I can tell you how to fix the problem. You will need to set up a 301 redirect from either xxx/index to xxx or xxx to xxx/index. I'd point the redirect to the page with more backlinks.
That should fix your duplicate content problem.
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
-
Moving pages to new domain
Hello, Our product pages are ranked #1 on google for our target keywords using our domain e.g. www.olddomain.com/cases/productxyz and sell about 20 products all ranked #1. We have a new company called www.newco.com/case/product1, 2, 3 etc. We use woocommerce e-commerce for both old and new sites. What is the best way to list our old co-products on our new site and move over the #1 rankings? Do we create new products (using our new nice design) in the newco.com woo commerce and then redirect old co links? do we copy and paste all that old content into the newco.com? Totally confused. Thank you!
Web Design | | Jamesmcd031 -
Dead end pages are really an issue?
Hi all, We have many pages which are help guides to our features. These pages do not have anymore outgoing links (internal / external). We haven't linked as these are already 4th level pages and specific about particular topic. So these are technically dead end pages. Do these pages really hurt us? We need to link to some other pages? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Is having a site map page necessary?
Hello all! So I know having a sitemap XML file is important to include in your robots.txt file. I also know it is important to submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing. However, I am wondering if it is beneficial for your site's SEO value to have a sitemap page displayed on your website? Or is this just a redundant action if you have already done the above two actions with your XML sitemap? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Myles920 -
Https pages indexed but all web pages are http - please can you offer some help?
Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version. I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards
Web Design | | SEOguy10 -
Problems preventing Wordpress attachment pages from being indexed and from being seen as duplicate content.
Hi According to a Moz Crawl, it looks like the Wordpress attachment pages from all image uploads are being indexed and seen as duplicate content..or..is it the Yoast sitemap causing it? I see 2 options in SEO Yoast: Redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL. Media...Meta Robots: noindex, follow I set it to (1) initially which didn't resolve the problem. Then I set it to option (2) so that all images won't be indexed but search engines would still associate those images with their relevant posts and pages. However, I understand what both of these options (1) and (2) mean, but because I chose option 2, will that mean all of the images on the website won't stand a chance of being indexed in search engines and Google Images etc? As far as duplicate content goes, search engines can get confused and there are 2 ways for search engines
Web Design | | SEOguy1
to reach the correct page content destination. But when eg Google makes the wrong choice a portion of traffic drops off (is lost hence errors) which then leaves the searcher frustrated, and this affects the seo and ranking of the site which worsens with time. My goal here is - I would like all of the web images to be indexed by Google, and for all of the image attachment pages to not be indexed at all (Moz shows the image attachment pages as duplicates and the referring site causing this is the sitemap url which Yoast creates) ; that sitemap url has been submitted to the search engines already and I will resubmit once I can resolve the attachment pages issues.. Please can you advise. Thanks.0 -
Incorporating Spanish Page/Site
We bought an exact match domain (in Spanish) to incorporate with regular website for a particular keyword. This is our first attempt at this, and while we do have Spanish speaking staff that will translate/create a nice, quality page, we're not going to redo everything in Spanish page. Any advice on how to implement this? Do I need to create a whole other website in Spanish? Will that be duplicate content if I do? Can I just set it up to show the first page in Spanish, but if they click on anything else it redirects to our site? I'm pretty clueless on this, so if anything I've suggested is off-the-wall or a violation, I'm really just spit-balling, trying to figure out how to implement this. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Are pages not included in navigation given less "weight"
Hi, we recently updated our website and our main navigation was dramatically slimmed down to just three pages and no drop down under those. Yet we have many more important pages, which are linked to once on one of those main three pages. However, will this hurt those other pages because they are not included in navigation (some of which were starting to get good traction in rankings)?
Web Design | | LuaMarketing2
Thanks!0 -
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized? If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title? If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true? Thanks mozzers!
Web Design | | Ron100