Duplicate page error

[Llanero]

SEO Moz gives me an duplicate page error as my homepage  www.monteverdetours.com is the same as www.monteverdetours.com/index is this actually en error? And is google penalizing me for this?

[Llanero]

The site should not look different. We changed some URLs for unranked kewords on minor pages (with 301 links). We added the canonical tag.

We got rid of the https and redirected by 301 to http

and some of the suggestions you said above.

No major stuff and the site is not recovering... so strange. I think we must have done something structurally wrongs. I would happily pay someone to revise my site and make suggestions. I am at my wits end. Need someone familar with MOdx.

Can you see something obviously wrong with the site?

[matbennett]

What other changes happened at that same time?  The site seems different?

[Llanero]

Between 12th and 16th July it dropped from page 8 to 45 and from 20 to 24th from page 45 to 86

[matbennett]

Do you know which day it dropped on?  There really isn't any reason that anything above should cause a drop. There have been updates - so let's figure out what is going on first.

[Llanero]

Hi Mat

Thank you so much for your detailed answer I really appreciated it. So here is an update....I asked my web master to implement the changes you suggested for www.monteverdetours.com - the site has dropped from page 2 or 3 to page 89 and we thought it would bounce back after a few days and it hasn't. Do you have any idea why this would be so?

Best Regards,

Janet

[Llanero]

Thank you so much!

[Matt-Williamson]

You are diluting your homepage strength as you could have some links to one version of the page and some to another. I would create a 301 redirect from the /index to the plane .com version. In Googles eyes you have two pages with the same content, this is a common mistake with a lot of websites and their homepage.

For more info read:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

[Webrevolve]

A great answer.

[matbennett]

Yes and No!    (that was helpful, wasn't i??!)

Google is smarter than seomoz crawler when it comes to dealing with this issue.  semoz seems to flag up home page variants quite often, but I haven't seen this cause a problem for a major search engine in years.  Generally  then it's pretty safe.

However - you do have some similar problems. To check the above I did a couple of searches for phrases that appear on your home page, limiting the results to pages off your domain.  Whilst the domain.com vs domain.com/index issue doesn't seem to be a problem, you do have something weird going on with your home page.

The following pages do appear to be duplicates of your home page, and these ARE appearing in the index:

https://www.monteverdetours.com/~desafio/

https://www.monteverdetours.com/index.html?iframe=true&width=95%25&height=95%25

And your home page isn't being listed properly.

What you need to do ASAP:

1. Consistently link to your home page: Where you have the home link up next to the sitemap link that to the home page throughout the site. Just to the www.domain.com version
2. Log in to google webmaster tools and tell it so ignore the following url parameters:
   • iframe
   • width
   • height
3. Look at getting a canonical tag added throughout your site to ensure that the correct URL is always indexed

I hope that is helpful.