Duplicate Homepage - How to fix?

[rswhtn]

Hi Everyone,

I've tried using BeamUsUp SEO Crawler and have found one warning and two errors on our site.

The warning is for a duplicate meta description, and the errors are a duplicate page and a duplicate title.

For each problem it's showing the same two pages as the source of the error, but one has a slash at the end and one doesn't. They're both for the homepage.

https://www.url.com/

And

https://www.url.com

Has anyone seen this before? Does anyone know if this is anything we should worry about?

[Elchanan]

@ThompsonPaul

Moz was warning me about thin content and I got the idea that it was because of "/" from

https://datayze.com/thin-content-checker.php?domain=https%3A%2F%2Falphalapia.com¶meters=&exclude=&elementtype=limit&elements=

which said zero unique phrases

maybe it's because i have "Home" and "Home_master" although the Home_master has eye crossed out (shouldnt be visible to goog)

[ThompsonPaul]

My answer above applies specifically to your situation too, @Elchanan. You are not being penalised by Google for duplicate content in your example.

As I mentioned, the root of a domain is a special case. The version with the slash at the end is considered the same URL as the one without the slash by both browsers and search engines. So much so that it is impossible to redirect from one to the other because that creates a redirect loop - the page is redirecting to itself.

If that SEO tool has warned you of that issue, it's because the tool isn't properly programmed to handle this unique situation correctly.

Hope that helps.

Paul

[Elchanan]

I'm having a similar problem with my wix site. I am being penalised by google for duplicate content of "my-site.com/" and "my-site.com"

i tried 301 redirect in wix but it doesnt seem to help according to https://datayze.com/thin-content-checker.php

Could someone help me

[rswhtn]

Thanks for the great answer, Paul, that's very helpful.

[ThompsonPaul]

This is an incorrect implementation in the BeamUsUp tool. The hostname (the basic root URL) is a special case. Both the version with the ending slash and without the ending slash are considered by browsers and search engines to be exactly the same.

In fact, you cannot redirect one to the other. Because the browser is programmed to consider them the same, you'll create an infinite loop. So not only is there nothing you should do, there's nothing you can do.

This is the only case where this is true though! For all other internal URLs. the version with the slash is considered to be a completely different URL than the one without the slash. So unless you redirect one version to the other for internal pages, you'll have duplicate content issues.

Hope that helps.

Paul

[JackSaville]

Hi there,

If you 301 redirect one version of the url to the other (whichever version matches the rest of your urls), then it should solve this duplicate content issue.

thanks!