Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
-
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions?
The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls:
Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village
http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm
Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village
http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/
Your help is greatly appreciated!
Sheryl
-
Totally helpful, thank you!
-
A relatively painless way (if .htaccess is too hard for your contact to implement) is to use rel canonical to point to the url you want since Google and Bing will (eventually) notice your canonical tag.
So, for http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm you could add a tag like the one below into your index.htm file in the head section:
You should also make sure that any links to the home page refer to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com rather than http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm
See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394 for more info on rel canonical
Having said that, a 301 redirect is probably the best way to solve the problem.
BTW, I'm assuming it is an Apache server and so uses .htaccess - IIS can be a bit more tricky (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis#chaining for IIS redirects)
You could use something like this in the .htaccess file (always make a backup copy of the .htaccess file before saving it in case something goes wrong - typos etc.):
BACKUP EXISTING .htaccess FIRST!!!
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
may need to uncomment the next line depending on host
#Options +FollowSymlinks
add www for non www pages - you may not need these two lines
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^cascadevillagehotel.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/$1 [L,R=301]
The following redirect is the one for index.htm assumes the default page is /
redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/
-
It's really important that you add a permanent 301 redirect from http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm pointing to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com (as mentioned by Marisa). Otherwise SEO goodness can be split between the two domains making it harder for you to get the sites ranking.
At the moment the homepage is accessible via 4 URL versions:
http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htmALSO, when you send the request you should also be requesting that a 301 redirect is also placed on the non-www URL version pointing to its respective www URL version - you'd want to have this done for every page e.g. http://cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel should redirect to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel
Note - I often have the same discussion with web developers, from their point of view it is the same page and I understand that but you just need to state that Google treats it as multiple versions (do some research are canonicalization).
-
No, I just send an email to the account manager at register.com telling him to do things exactly as I say. It is very time consuming, but this is the way the business owner wants it done for now.
-
Do you have access to the root directory to set up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file?
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
-
Redirect our www.website.com to website. Com/target-keyword
Dear moz community I have been analyzing the websites that rank in top 20 for our target keywords. All of the top 20 sites except us have their websites re directing to websites.com/target keyword. This is due to probably because they have multiple city's and one of the target keywords term is cityname + word. My question is and idea - make a 301 to our www.website.com to /city-keyword and start linking to that page with new links. Would that bring any benefit? Seems that it's a very strong ranking signal. Any threats that I must take into account? We currently rank as #9
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
Is there an SEO advantage to blog content being a child of /blog/ rather than the homepage?
I'm working on a website where all the blog content is listed as separate pages from the homepage, eg: www.domain.com/first-blog-post
Technical SEO | | MillyShaw
www.domain.com/second-blog-post However, it would make my life easier if all blog content was listed under /blog/ so that I could analyse it better in Google Analytics. Eg I'd like it to be: www.domain.com/blog/first-blog-post
www.domain.com/blog/second-blog-post The developer is not keen because it would create extra work for him, and he's also said it's a bad idea from an SEO point of view. But is this the case? Presumably with 301s in place it wouldn't make a difference? Thanks for your help!0 -
150+ Pages of URL Parameters - Mass Duplicate Content Issue?
Hi we run a large e-commerce site and while doing some checking through GWT we came across these URL parameters and are now wondering if we have a duplicate content issue. If so, we are wodnering what is the best way to fix them, is this a task with GWT or a Rel:Canonical task? Many of the urls are driven from the filters in our category pages and are coming up like this: page04%3Fpage04%3Fpage04%3Fpage04%3F (See the image for more). Does anyone know if these links are duplicate content and if so how should we handle them? Richard I7SKvHS
Technical SEO | | Richard-Kitmondo0 -
Possible duplicate content issue with my Blog and archive pages . Any help greatly appreciated
Dear Mozzers, I have been looking at my news section on my eCommerce site and I think I may have a duplicate content issue and wanted some advice on whether I do and if so , how best I handle this. http://www.website.co.uk/news
Technical SEO | | PeteC12
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:1
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:2
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:3
http://www.website.co.uk/news/limit:9999 (This is show all) I also have the ability of showing articles by month : http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/04 (April)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/03 (March)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/02 (Feb)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/01 (Jan) I am wondering if there's a duplicate issue here or not given that I also articles by month as well and if so how best I handle this.? I already do pagination on my news pages (page 1 , page 2) by using rel=next and rel=Prev but I don't have an canconical or anything as yet. I enclose a couple of links if this would help and would appreciate if someone could take a browse. I have a View All link on my homepage for for all news items - http://goo.gl/JPPIvQ I which have a different urls - March 2015 Articles - http://goo.gl/0O1wYD and April 2015 articles - http://goo.gl/GdW2oK On another note, These articles are also linked to from the relevant category landing pages on my website to help with SEO. I have not used H tags on the article links in my landing pages , just displaying the weblink back to the news article.I've done this to try and improve the PR and rankings of my landing pages. Just wondered if anyone has any comments as to whether thats a good or bad idea and whether I could improve it in any way - An example is here (scroll down the page to the pressure washing guides) - http://goo.gl/nnRE49 Thanks Pete0 -
Is it better to use XXX.com or XXX.com/index.html as canonical page
Is it better to use 301 redirects or canonical page? I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc.
Technical SEO | | Nanook10 -
Can Page Content & Description Have Same Content?
I'm studying my crawl report and there are several warnings regarding missing meta descriptions. My website is built in WordPress and part of the site is a blog. Several of these missing description warnings are regarding blog posts and I was wondering if I am able to copy the first few lines of content of each of the posts to put in the meta description, or would that be considered duplicate content? Also, there are a few warnings that relate to blog index pages, e.g. http://www.iainmoran.com/2013/02/ - I don't know if I can even add a description of these as I think they are dynamically created? While on the subject of duplicate content, if I had a sidebar with information on several of the pages (same info) while the content would be coming from a WP Widget, would this still be considered duplicate content and would Google penalise me for it? Would really appreciate some thoughts on this,please. Thanks, Iain.
Technical SEO | | iainmoran0 -
Duplicate titles / canonical / Drupal
I have a site where there are several duplicate titles, looks like mainly based on a parameterized vs. non-parameterized version of the page. I have what appears to be a proper canonical tag, but webmaster still complains of both duplicate titles & meta descriptions. A good example (taken out of webmaster report for http://igottadrive.com) is: /driving-tips/mirror-setup-and-use /driving-tips/mirror-setup-and-use?inline=true If I look at the page (in either case) there appears to be a correct canonical tag pointing to the base case. However, for some reason google is either ignoring the canonical or its not properly done. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | uwaim20120 -
A rel="canonical" to www.homepage.com/home.aspx Hurts my Rank?
Hello, The CMS that I use makes 3 versions of the homepage:
Technical SEO | | EvolveCreative
www.homepage.com/home.aspx homepage.com homepage.com/default.aspx By default the CMS is set to rel=canonical all versions to the www.homepage.com/home.aspx version. If someone were to link to a website they most likely aren't going to link to www.homepage.com/home.aspx, they'll link to www.homepage.com which makes that link juice flow through the canonical to www.homepage.com/home.aspx right? Why make that extra loop at all? Wouldn't that be splitting the juice? I know 301's loose 1-5 % juice, but not sure about canonical. I assume it works the same way? Thanks! http://yoursiteroot/0