How do I fix a duplicate content error with a top level domain?

[milengo]

Hi,

I'm getting a duplicate content error from the SEOmoz crawler due to an issue with trailing slashes.

It's showing www.milengo.com and www.milengo.com/ as having duplicate page titles. However I'm pretty sure this has been fixed in the .htaccess file since if you type in the domain with a trailing slash it automatically redirects to the domain without a trailing slash, so this shouldn't be an issue.

I'm stuck here. Any ideas?

Thanks.

Rob

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Rob,

Couple of things:

1. You can check if you have a proper 301 in place using tools like URI Valet. For example, here's a report for the SEOmoz blog. If you include a backslash, it automatically redirects to remove it:

http://urivalet.com/?http://www.seomoz.org/blog/#Report

2. An actual better way to address this is with canoncial tags. A proper canonical on the homepage (pointing to the version without the slash) will address all duplicate content errors, and possibly also address other versions of your URL you didn't anticipate, like:

• www.example.com
• example.com
• www.example.com/index.html

3. Although SEOmoz will flag these as errors (because technically they are) in reality a trailing slash on your homepage isn't a big deal. Google has gotten pretty good at figuring these URLs out. That said, it's still important to address other areas of duplicate content on your site.

Hope this helps. Best of luck!

[SaforwebDesign]

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