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Just fyi and for anyone who might be interested: That was the solution! I put the rel=canonical tag in the homepage header and my duplicate page content problem was gone!

Thanks!!!

You are right about the site dynamically creating pages. But the only one with the duplicate content issue is the homepage. I only need a rel=canonical tag for this one

Unfortunately contacting the people who originally wrote the code for the website and have them make changes is not an option

I will either have to figure this out on my own or find someone who can help me

Hi Martijn!

Yes there is a header in my homepage.php file. Does that help? I thought the rel=canonical tag has to go in the file you want to "redirect"?

Hi lynnp!

Thanks for explaining! That was very helpful.

Hi Everyone!

Thanks to moz.com, I just found out that we have a duplicate content issue: mywebsite.com and mywebsite.com/index.php have the same content. I would like to make mywebsite.com the main one because it already has a few links and a better page rank.

I know how to do a 301 redirect (already have one for www.mywebsite.com) but I am aware that a 301 redirect for my index file would create a loop issue. I have read the article about redirecting without creating a loop (http://moz.com/blog/apache-redirect-an-index-file-to-your-domain-without-looping) but quite frankly I don't even have a clue what he's trying to tell me (e.g. "Create an apache DirectoryIndex directive for your document root." What????!)… So I figured a rel="canonical" tag for my index file would be easier and fix the problem, too (right??)

In every "How to" description they always say you have to put the  rel="canonical" tag in the header of your duplicate content file. But: My index.php has no header (or nothing that looks like a header to me)! This is what it looks like:

foreach($_GET as $key => $value)
{
$$key = $value;
}
foreach($_POST as $key => $value)
{
$$key = $value;
} 
$page_title="my title";
$page_description="my description";
$page_keywords="keywords";
//echo $link;
//exit;
if (!isset($link)):
$page_content="homepage.php";
else:
if ($link=="services"):
$page_content="services.php";
$page_title=" my title for services page";
$page_description="description for services.";
endif;
… ect. for the other pages

So where do I put the rel=canonical tag?

Or is there another solution for the whole problem? Like delete the whole index file (lol)

Thanks in advance for any answers!

Hi everyone!

I am a newbie to the whole SEO and html thing and I am trying to get a better understanding of the "behind the scenes" part of my website. I hope I can find someone here who can translate a piece of code for me that I have in my htaccess file:

Options -Multiviews
Options +FollowSymLinks
rewritecond $1 !^(index.php|public|tmp|robots.txt|template.html|favicon.ico|images|css|uploads)
rewritecond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
rewritecond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
rewriterule ^(.*)$ index.php?link=$1 [NC,L,QSA]

I know that something is getting redirected to the index file, but what (or when) exactly? Does the word "robots"mean that search engine crawlers are getting redirected here? And is this good or bad (in terms of  SEO)? Or is this redirecting people who try to get to my robots/ template or image files??

Thanks in advance for any answers!