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Thank you so much for all the responses. So it sounds like 301 redirect through htaccess is the way to go. What is the difference between using the 301 through htaccess vs using rel=canonical in my case? Does the 301 provide better link juice vs rel=canonical or is canonical just not applicable in this case? Thanks for all the replies and helpful suggestions again!

EDIT: I spoke to my developer (who is hosting and maintaining my site now).. he said he tried to do 301 through htaccess but it seems to be crashing the site (and trust me he is very good at what he does). Part of the problem is that my site is VERY old (originally build about 10 years ago and NOT updated once since).. he has been slowly updating and cleaning up the site slowly and he will try to figure out why the 301 is crashing the site and not working but in the mean time how safe is it to use rel=canonical instead of a 301?

Thanks again!

Hello,

I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page).

According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical

I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above.

Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!