Index page

[Johnny4B]

To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal

I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com.

All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content.

Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website.

Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ...

Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem.

For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously)

I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content)

To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is  a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website.

This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years.

As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ?

Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ?

Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status

Many thanks in advance

John

[Johnny4B]

Thanks, I thought as much

[rmontanez]

It will be duplicate content because you will have two or more duplicate versions of a webpage appear on different URLs.

Quoting Dr. Pete:

"In Google’s eyes, it doesn’t matter whether the pages have extensions (“.php”), the home-page is at the root (“/”) or at index.php, or even if every page is being driven off of one physical template. There are four unique URLs, and that means there are four pages. If Google can crawl them all, they’ll all be indexed (usually)."

**Source: **http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-page-is-canonical **Reference link: **http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

I hope this helps.

[Johnny4B]

Wow, just rereading that myslef, its rather a long winded way to ask a simple question

Put simply, is it ok to have both the www.mysite.com and the www,mysite.com/index.html page, will it be viewed as duplicate content by search engines

Thanks

John