Hi Arti,

Generally, you want to link to your root domain. Many common website templates link to home as /index.html, but that really hasn't been necessary for years.

The easiest way to fix this would be to add a canonical tag in your homepage, which is the /index.html file. It would go in the section and look like this:

After you add this, when you look at your source code for your homepage, you should see this tag in there from whatever address you reached the page from.

There's a lot of information on duplicate content out there, and a lot of different ways to fix the same problem. Here's a good overview of the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Ben,

There's no evidence that I'm aware of that Google penalizes sites for using duplicate templates. It would be the same thing as using the same template on 1000 pages of your blog - you aren't penalized as long as the majority of the 1000 pages have unique content. It works the same way across multiple domains.

Sounds dangerous!

Usually, these types of links may be found on high authority pages, but the placement is spammy, such as deep in the footer with 100 other links, or an out-of-context sidebar link.

Do the pages have PageRank? I only ask because a page may display both PA and DA, but if it's been de-indexed by Google then it most likely will be stripped of PageRank.

The other problem is relevance. The links may be of little value to you if they don't come from on-topic pages.

In short, I would advise you stay away from this.

But, to answer your question, you would need a ton of links to move your Domain Authority from 62 to 78. That's because both PA and DA are scaled algorithmically, meaning a ten point jump could be 100 times more difficult to achieve. At the upper ranges, the difference between scores becomes much more pronounced, so that it's much more difficult to rise from a 60 to 70, than it is to go from a 10 to a 20.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.