Duplicate Homepage In Google
-
Hi
Just found through my SEO dashboard, Google has two versions of the same homepage, the root page, plus the index.html page, causing duplicate content from both the pages.
what is the best option to ensure google only have 1 version of the homepage listed?
-
I'm not a big fan of doubling-up on canonicalization tactics, because there's no good way to tell what's working. The 301 is probably a tiny bit stronger (not much, in my experience), but the advantage of the canonical tag on the home-page is that one tag will sweep up any variants. If you 301 "index.html" to the root, and then someone comes along and uses the non-www version of your home-page or adds a tracking parameter ("index.html?track=1234"), etc., the 301 won't do anything - you'll have to create 301s for each situation. The canonical will prevent those problems, which are very common on home pages.
-
Correct - usually, it's all the same physical page (on the server), so you only need to put it in one place.
-
Hi
just found I have same issues on my own website. However bit confused how I would change this. When the website was developed they where php pages, we did a rewrite so these pages went to .html pages instead, see file below. However now with my website www.rfksolutions.co.uk and www.rfksolutions.co.uk/index.html seem to be duplicate?
see my current htaccess file
any ideas?
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^index.html$ index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^about-us.html$ about-us.php [L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio.html$ portfolio.php [L]
RewriteRule ^partners.html$ partners.php [L]
RewriteRule ^logo-design-portfolio.html$ logo-design-portfolio.php [L]
RewriteRule ^graphic-design-portfolio.html$ graphic-design-portfolio.php [L]
RewriteRule ^graphic-design-portfolio2.html$ graphic-design-portfolio2.php [L]
RewriteRule ^testimonials.html$ testimonials.php [L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio/([0-9a-zA-Z_-]+).html$ portfolio_details.php?&title=$1 [L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^rfksolutions.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.rfksolutions.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ "http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk" [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^falkirkwebdesign.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.falkirkwebdesign.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk/$1" [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^falkirkwebdesigners.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.falkirkwebdesigners.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk/$1" [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^webdesignfalkirk.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.webdesignfalkirk.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk/$1" [R=301,L] -
I am confused on when to use both 301 and rel=canonical at the same time and when to use each separately. I have received advice through other Q&As saying to use both for my homepage in this exact same scenario, but sometimes SEOs advise to use rel=canonical on every page to point to its same location.
If 301s pass along "most" of the link juice, then why use both? What's the disadvantage of just using a 301?
D
-
Good job, 301's are usually the reliable & trusted solution. Canonical tags are really useful for other redirecting purposes such as similar content issues. All the best
-
Hi
thanks for that, it was a 301 i was thinking about, that is what I would normally have done, if for instance an old page had some link juice I would 301 it to another page, but I hadnt done one for this reason
I have just setup a 301 now for the domain name
-
Hi There
There are a couple of options;
-
301 Redirect the index.html page to your root domain, e.g. http://example.com/index.html 301 redirected to http://example.com
-
Use a Canonical tag, pointing the index.html page to your root domain.
You'll find a really helpful Redirection Guide here on SEOmoz.
You can also find here on SEOmoz a useful guide to Canonical tags.
I'd almost always recommend for this particular scenario, opting for a 301 Redirect on the page index.html to your root domain. Chances are (for these two pages) your inbound links will tend to mainly point to your root domain rather than the index.html page.
I hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
-
-
thanks for your help, sorry just to confirm
if I wanted google to keep the www.mydomain.com instead of www.mydomain.com/index.html as the main homepage I would put the link rel= onto the index/html and put the www.mydomain.com in there?
-
Adding the canonical tag within your telling search engines which homepage to use - this seemed to work for us:
If you're having duplicate content throughout your site, I've read having your site admin do something with the htaccess file would do the trick.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirect 301 to homepage
Hello there, I have some low quality pages in my site, can I redirect 301 them to my homepage? My website is: https://idanito.com idanito.com
Technical SEO | | dannybaldwin0 -
Duplicate Content
HI There, Hoping someone can help me - before i damage my desk banging my head. Getting notifications from ahrefs and Moz for duplicate content. I have no idea where these weird urls have came from , but they do take us to the correct page (but it seems a duplicate of this page). correct url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Antique-Vintage-Rings-c152.htm Incorrect url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm This is showing for most of our store categories 😞 Desperate for help as to what could be causing these issues. I have a technical member of the ecommerce software go through the large sitemap files and they assured me it wasn't linked to the sitemap files. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Google Disavow Tool
Some background: My rankings have been wildly fluctuating for the past few months for no apparent reason. When I inquired about this, many people said that even though I haven't received any penalty notice, I was probably affected by penguin. (http://moz.com/community/q/ranking-fluctuations) I recently did a link detox by LinkRemovalTools and it gave me a list of all my links, 2% were toxic and 51% were suspiscious. Should I simply disavow the 2%? There are many sites where is no contact info.
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Google not pulling my favicon
Several sites use Google favicon to load favicons instead of loading it from the Website itself. Our favicon is not being pulled from our site correctly, instead it shows the default "world" image. https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=www.example.com Is the address to pull a favicon. When I post on G+ or see other sites that use that service to pull favicons ours isn't displaying, despite it shows up in Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc and we have the correct meta in all pages of our site. Any idea why is this happening? Or how to "ping" Google to update that?
Technical SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
Duplicate titles- what quailfies??
What qulifies as a duplicate title? If I have one tile Kelowna Real estate Smith McLellan Group and another title Kelowna Condos Smith Mclellan Group Is that a dupilcate title??
Technical SEO | | Realtor1010 -
Duplicate Content Issue with
Hello fellow Moz'rs! I'll get straight to the point here - The issue, which is shown in the attached image, is that for every URL ending in /blog/category/name, it has a duplicate page of /blog/category/name/?p=contactus. Also, its worth nothing that the ?p=contact us are not in the SERPs but were crawled by SEOMoz and they are live and duplicate. We are using Pinnacle cart. Is there a way to just stop the crawlers from ?p=contactus or? Thank you all and happy rankings, James
Technical SEO | | JamesPiper0 -
Is this a google dance?
My website keeps moving up and down in ranking but stays within page 2 to 3. Everyday its at a new position.
Technical SEO | | ragivan0 -
Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?
I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June. On Bing I am like 9th On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows Original: www.playpokeronline.ca Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/ this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy. for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month. Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site. Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty? Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else? This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time Thank You Jeb
Technical SEO | | PokerCanada0