Internal Duplicate Content/Canonical Issue/ or nothing to worry about

[gymmad]

Unfortunately, my developer cannot give me an answer to this so I really do hope someone can help. The homepage of my website is http://www.laddersfree.co.uk however I also have a page http://www.laddersfree.co.uk/index.php that has a page rank and essentially duplicates the home page. Does someone know what this is? Do I need to get my developer to do a 404? It is worrying that he has not come back to me. Thanks Jason

[SorinaDascalu]

You are welcome!

[gymmad]

Thank you so much for your help!

[SorinaDascalu]

Since on both these pages the canonical URL is set to http://www.laddersfree.co.uk/ chances are that the pages are not seen as duplicate content. But the rel="canonical" is just a suggestion not a directive for bots, so there is a chance they may ignore it.  To play safe, since this is a matter you can easily solve, you shouldn't rely only on the rel="canonical".

You don't need to 404 the .index.php page, you need to make a 301 redirect from it to http://www.laddersfree.co.uk. This way most of the link juice from .index.php will be passed to http://www.laddersfree.co.uk.

In order to do that, you can add to the .htaccess file located in the root folder of your website the following lines of code:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ http://www.laddersfree.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]