Moz crawler finding my homepage multiple times

[Keenan-Price]

Hi and thank you in advance for your help!

I have a Moz Pro campaign running (I am a complete Moz novice by the way) for one of my websites (balloonsutah.com). After crawling my site, the Moz crawler informed me that I have 3 pages with duplicate content. While I am not sure why exactly this is happening, the crawler indexed my homepage 3 times under different url's.

-balloonsutah.com
-balloonsutah.com/
-balloonsutah.com/index.html

I checked my FTP server and I cannot figure out for the life of me why the crawler is finding anything other than the index.html file.

I suppose I need to do something regarding a rel="Canonical" but I am not terribly familiar with that either.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Keenan

[Modbargains]

You're welcome!

[Keenan-Price]

Great answer! I appreciate the time you spent spelling everything out in detail. Thank you!

[Modbargains]

First things first, I did check all web addresses. They all exist. You probably need to provide more detail whether or not you are using a CMS for your web pages.

All 3 pages have different page authority. That is, one of the version is ranking higher than the other versions. I did a quick check of that via Moz toolbar. Looks like the index.html has the highest authority.

Note that all 3 versions you listed, has 2 other versions. The one with the www, and the one without the www. Judging from the moz toolbar, looks like you rank better for the one without the 'www' . Rel canonical is is good option, but in this case I would try to do a 301 redirect from the server side first. Again, not sure how much access you have to the server side. You might need to contact your web admin.host company etc.

You can read about redirects more over here. --> http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection. If you don't have access to the server you can try doing the rel canonical. Read more here --> http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

Example. you have www.example.com/page1.htm, /page2.htm, page3.htm. They all have same exact content. Lets say that pag1.htm is your main version. You can do the following in the header section of page2, and page 3.htm

"This tag tells Bing and Google that the given page should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.example.com/pag1.htm/ and that all of the links and content metrics the engines apply should actually be credited toward the provided URL."

I would recommend not to delete all the other version, but instead do a 301 redirect, or a rel canonical, as they all of some kind of page authority, except index.html has the highest. (the non www version). But you need to make that decision. But looks like that's what you want to be the main one anyway.

ALSO,

You can tell google which version you prefer to google in GWT. This informs google which version you prefer. You can read more here.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en

"Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages."

"Note: Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer."

You cannot control the www and non www versons of your website, but you can control, making duplicate pages, especially of your home page. I am guessing that that is something that was done by your CMS. Index.html was probably done by you. FURTHERMORE, I think .com/ & .com is the one and the same thing. and you probably had to decide, when you were making a new campaign in moz. They probably asked you to put down your web address for your domain, and your probably put something like, "balloonsutah.com"Not exactly sure, why it showed you .com & .com/, but it makes sense that they would show you, .com, and /index.html, as they are two different pages, even though it has the same content. It still is two different URL's.

I probably wouldn't worry too much about it. But I'll let one of the moz members answer about .com &.com/. I would perhaps concern myself more about 301 redirects, and rel canonicals.

Hope I helped.

[Keenan-Price]

Thank you for the help!

[Ray-pp]

Hello Keenan-price,

Welcome to the Moz community!

Moz is reporting these duplicates correctly. Each of the listed URLs are seen as unique URLs and unique pages. This is a common problem when a website does not have the proper canonical tags and 301 redirects in place for these URLs.

You'll want to decide on how your website should be displayed (which URL you prefer) and implement the canonical tag and 301 redirects.

the 301 redirects could be done with your .htaccess file, depending on your site environment. The canonical tags would depend on your site's environment (wordpress, custom development, ect).

Also, make sure to go into your Google Webmaster Tools account and specify a single page as being the correct page, once you've decided on how you want the URL to be displayed.