Duplicate content issue. Delete index.html and replace with www.?
-
I have a duplicate content issue. On my site the home button goes to the index.html and not the www. If I change it to the www will it impact my SERPS? I don't think anyone links to the index.html.
-
When you say "delete", do you mean delete it from the home button (and just use the root version), or delete the page? Keep in mind that the "index.html" page also drives the root version of the site ("www.example.com/"), so you definitely don't want to delete that file.
Whether you use 301-redirects or canonical tags (either should be ok, but it sounds like the canonical tag would be easier for you to implement), it is important to use a consistent path. So, you do need to change the button link to match the canonical version of the URL. Don't do this until after you've got either the 301 or canonical tag in place.
-
Remember, if you put this in the PHP code, it has to be conditional - you don't want to redirect your canonical version unnecessarily. Since your home-page is just one template, you'd be firing a 301 for every situation.
-
Well the canonical will be different for every page...so if your page is:
www.jeremygower.com/contact/index.php
your canonical would be:
Basically, what that says is..."hey google, it doesn't matter what URL you think you're at, make sure that the only one in your search engine is the one in the canonical tag"...therefore, be very careful with it as well. If you simply put www.jeremygower.com as the canonical for every page, google would de-index every other page of your site.
Anywhere in the head is good.
IMO, unlimited ends up being a bad thing...the way those things work is that godaddy (or whoever) puts a ton of websites on the same server, so think about the 500 or so other sites with 'unlimited' bandwidth using your server. It makes it slow...for instance there's about 400 domains on the same server as my domain, and yes, it's slow a lot of the time...the cheap plan on a small orange I'm sure is similar but I'd expect better quality than godaddy. (they dont have unlimited)
-
I use dream weaver as my HTML editor, I templated out my site so I wonder if I can just put the code at the top of the template and have it update every page on my site. Now where in the head do I put the code? At the very beginning? Also I know yahoo, godaddy and others promote unlimited bandwidth and storage while others have a tiered plan. Isn't it better to have unlimited? I'm just asking since there is an up charge if you go over the bandwidth or storage on the other hosting plans. Thank you for your help.
-
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header ('Location: http://www.whatever.com/whatever.php');
-------- As far as I know there's no difference...to Google a 301 is a 301 no matter where you tell it. Would still be a pain in the butt, though - and I'm not sure 100% efficient....the best thing (i think) would be to have a canonical on every single page, then that will take care of it from the search engine standpoint. However, I'd still go somewhere that allows rewrites...that's just crazy. Even my godaddy shared hosting allows htaccess. Dont go to Godaddy shared hosting - it's awful. Not sure where to get cheap hosting with htaccess, but I'd venture to say that most hosts support it. I'd look into a small orange, it's offered as a pro perk through SEOmoz for 3 months at half price and it looks like they offer $20/mo plans for business - or if you wanna try it $35/yr plan as well. From my experience, as long as you do it correctly, changing hosts will not affect your SERPs. We actually moved in January and saw nothing change.
-
Also is using a php code a real 301 redirect or no? Do you have a sample php code that I could use? I'm still in learning mode.
-
Which hosting company do you prefer? Which one is best for seo purposes? And how do I transfer without impacting my SERPS or does it have no impact?
-
Well, 301 would be best...but I suppose in that situation what I'd do is use the canonical tags...but that's a pain as you'd need to do it for like every page...
In short, that's just whack...I'd find a new host.
Edit: P.S. Why can't yahoo just die already?
-
I should put the code in the head right? Thank you.
-
Thank you, I am trying to figure out how to do the 301 redirect but when i asked yahoo they say that the php code is not a real 301 redirect when I asked them. And they only do the 301 redirect on the ecommerce hosting plans which I have no need for. Any insight? Thanks for your answer.
-
Just to follow up on this. the meta tag for this is
-
You should have a 301 redirect setup so that everything goes to one address, ie. www.jeremygower.com....so that no matter if they type index.html or www.jeremygower.com/ or jeremygower.com it all goes to the same place. Other than that, an easier method (and you should probably do both...just put a canonical tag on that page, then no matter what the main page will get the link juice.
And yes, it probably will - either way, you should fix it.
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
-
Discovered - currently not indexed issue
Hello all, We have a sitemap with URLs that have mostly user generated content. Profile Overview section. Where users write about their services and some other things. Out of 46K URLs, only 14K are valid according to search console and 32K URLs are excluded. Out of these 32K, 28K are "Discovered - currently not indexed". We can't really update these pages as they have user generated content. However we do want to leverage all these pages to help us in our SEO. So the question is how do we make all of these pages indexable? If anyone can help in the regard, please let me know. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | akashkandari0 -
Duplicate content and canonicalization confusion
Hello, http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same. Please help me clear this confusion. Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Duplicate content on user queries
Our website supports a unique business industry where our users will come to us to look for something very specific (a very specific product name) to find out where they can get it. The problem that we're facing is that the products are constantly changing due to the industry. So, for example, one month, one product might be found on our website, and the next, it might be removed completely... and then might come back again a couple months later. All things that are completely out of our control - and we have no way of receiving any sort of warning when these things might happen. Because of this, we're seeing a lot of duplicate content issues arise... For Example... Product A is not active today... so www.mysite.com/search/productA will return no results... Product B is also not active today... so www.mysite.com/search/productB will also return no results. As per Moz Analytics, these are showing up as duplicate content because both pages indicate "No results were found for {your searched term}." Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to return a 204 in these situations (which I don't know if a 204 would help anyway) or a 404, because, for a faster user experience, we simultaneously render different sections of the page... so in the very beginning of the page load - we start rendering the faster content (template type of content) that says "returning 200 code, we got the query successfully & we're loading the page".. the unique content results finish loading last since they take the longest. I'm still very new to the SEO world, so would greatly appreciate any ideas or suggestions that might help with this... I'm stuck. 😛 Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | SFMoz0 -
Duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
Good afternoon. I've tried searching for an answer to the following question but I believe my circumstance is a little different than what has been asked in the past. I currently run a Australian website targeted at a specific demographic (50-75) and we produce a LARGE number of articles on a wide variety of lifestyle segments. All of our focus up until now has been in Australia and our SEO and language is dedicated towards this. The next logical step in my mind is to launch a mirror website targeted at the US market. This website would be a simple mirror of a large number of articles (1000+) on subjects such as Food, Health, Travel, Money and Technology. Our current CMS has no problems in duplicating the specific items over and sharing everything, the problem is in the fact that we currently use a .com.au domain and the .com domain in unavailable and not for sale, which would mean we have to create a new name for the US targeted domain. The question is, how will mirroring this information, targeted towards US, affect us on Google and would we better off getting a large number of these articles 're-written' by a company on freelancer.com etc? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Geelong
Drew0 -
Root domain not resolving to www. Duplicate content?
Hi, I'm working with a domain that stays on the root domain if the www is not included. But if the www is included, it stays with the www. LIke this: example.com
Technical SEO | | HardyIntl
or
www.example.com Of course, they are identical and both go to the same IP. Do search engines consider that to be duplicate content? thanks,
michael0 -
Aspx filters causing duplicate content issues
A client has a url which is duplicated by filters on the page, for example: - http://www.example.co.uk/Home/example.aspx is duplicated by http://www.example.co.uk/Home/example.aspx?filter=3 The client is moving to a new website later this year and is using an out-of-date Kentico CMS which would need some development doing to it in order to enable implementation of rel canonical tags in the header, I don't have access to the server and they have to pay through the nose everytime they want the slightest thing altering. I am trying to resolve this duplicate content issue though and am wondering what is the best way to resolve it in the short term. The client is happy to remove the filter links from the page but that still leaves the filter urls in Google. I am concerned that a 301 redirect will cause a loop and don't understand the behaviour of this type of code enough. I hope this makes sense, any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | travelinnovations0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0 -
Up to my you-know-what in duplicate content
Working on a forum site that has multiple versions of the URL indexed. The WWW version is a top 3 and 5 contender in the google results for the domain keyword. All versions of the forum have the same PR, but but the non-WWW version has 3,400 pages indexed in google, and the WWW has 2,100. Even worse yet, there's a completely seperate domain (PR4) that has the forum as a subdomain with 2,700 pages indexed in google. The dupe content gets completely overwhelming to think about when it comes to the PR4 domain, so I'll just ask what you think I should do with the forum. Get rid of the subdomain version, and sometimes link between two obviously related sites or get rid of the highly targeted keyword domain? Also what's better, having the targeted keyword on the front of Google with only 2,100 indexed pages or having lower rankings with 3,400 indexed pages? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Hondaspeder0