undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
  4. Mod Rewrite / .htaccess avoid duplicate content

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Mod Rewrite / .htaccess avoid duplicate content

Technical SEO
3
8
5.0k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • MiamiWebCompany
    MiamiWebCompany last edited by Mar 22, 2012, 6:51 PM

    I have been searching and testing for hours but cannot find a solution. I am able to get a URL to display with out the file exntension.

    i.e domain.com/file instead of domain.com/file.php

    The problem is both versions of the URL above work, therefore a duplicate content issue. How can I force the URL with the file extension not to resolve and give a 404 error? Or just redirect to the non extension URL?

    IF it helps here is my code.

    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
    RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1.php [L,QSA]

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • blacey
      blacey @MiamiWebCompany last edited by Mar 29, 2012, 6:06 PM Mar 29, 2012, 6:06 PM

      Hi Erik,

      No problem, glad I could help 🙂

      To answer your question, No it doesn't matter which you use because the end result will be re-written to remove the file extension and add a forward slash at the end.

      For consistency I would suggest having it without the .php inside your content though. If nothing else it would save you the pain of having to remove .php from your content if you moved to a content management system in the future.

      If you've got any other questions let me know, and I'll be happy to help.

      Ben

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • MiamiWebCompany
        MiamiWebCompany @blacey last edited by Mar 29, 2012, 5:45 PM Mar 29, 2012, 5:45 PM

        Didnt say thanks before, so thank you. One question I did not think of. Should the internal linking of the site be to the file name with extension or no extension?

        I think it should be without extension but just want to double check.

        blacey 1 Reply Last reply Mar 29, 2012, 6:06 PM Reply Quote 0
        • MiamiWebCompany
          MiamiWebCompany @MiamiWebCompany last edited by Mar 26, 2012, 9:29 PM Mar 26, 2012, 9:29 PM

          Hi Ben. I tried this code on another hosting account and it did worked. The first account was a VPS account from Godaddy. The second was a shared account from the same hosting company. Im not sure why it works on one and not on the other. I did see the mod_rewrite option enabled.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • blacey
            blacey @MiamiWebCompany last edited by Mar 26, 2012, 9:30 PM Mar 23, 2012, 7:31 PM

            Just tried this on my development server and it worked fine:

            RewriteBase / RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^test.local RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ (.).php\ HTTP RewriteRule (.).php$ $1 [R=301]

            remove index RewriteRule (.*)index$ $1 [R=301]

            remove slash if not directory RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$ RewriteRule (.)/ $1 [R=301] # add .php to access file, but don't redirect RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$RewriteRule (.) $1.php [L]

            The dev URL is test.local so you would want to change this to www.yourdomain.co.ukI had a page called about.php if I entered http://test.local/about.php or http://test.local/about it would show http://test.local/about in the address bar

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • MiamiWebCompany
              MiamiWebCompany @blacey last edited by Mar 23, 2012, 12:18 PM Mar 23, 2012, 12:18 PM

              Hi Ben. Thanks for your help but this does not work for some reason. Im testing it on an old site I have that is html and I just replaced php for html but both URL's still resolves.

              blacey MiamiWebCompany 2 Replies Last reply Mar 26, 2012, 9:29 PM Reply Quote 0
              • loopyal
                loopyal @blacey last edited by Mar 22, 2012, 11:37 PM Mar 22, 2012, 11:37 PM

                Good answer Ben.

                My main site is my own CMS, that I built 10 years ago, so after I added a lot of things to the .htaccess file and it became too large, I just moved the handling inside the control program, that only looks up filed URLs when they are broken. This processing is fast, but if there was any degradation, it only affects the broken URLs.

                Speaking of broken URLs, I was getting a few 400 return codes and it seems the webserver handles those, so you have no chance to handle it in .htaccess. So the wat to handle that is with a 400 handler - that on cpanel sites just needs a 400.shtml file, that you can customize.

                • you get a 400 response if you request a URL with a % symbol on the end, and some other site did that, thanks very much, and then google decided it would be a great thing to index.
                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • blacey
                  blacey last edited by Mar 22, 2012, 7:22 PM Mar 22, 2012, 7:02 PM

                  Try using this instead:

                  <code>RewriteBase /</code> 
                  

                  <code># remove .php; use THE_REQUEST to prevent infinite loops
                  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com
                  RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ (.).php\ HTTP
                  RewriteRule (.
                  ).php$ $1 [R=301]

                  remove index

                  RewriteRule (.*)index$ $1 [R=301]

                  remove slash if not directory

                  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$
                  RewriteRule (.*)/ $1 [R=301]

                  add .php to access file, but don't redirect

                  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
                  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
                  RewriteRule (.*) $1.php [L]</code>

                  loopyal MiamiWebCompany 3 Replies Last reply Mar 29, 2012, 5:45 PM Reply Quote 1
                  • 1 / 1
                  1 out of 8
                  • First post
                    1/8
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • rj_dale

                    Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"

                    duplicate content

                    Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!

                    Technical SEO | Jun 9, 2022, 2:29 PM | rj_dale
                    0
                  • Tom3_15

                    Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"

                    Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.

                    Technical SEO | Sep 4, 2018, 11:15 AM | Tom3_15
                    0
                  • Rooted

                    Query Strings causing Duplicate Content

                    I am working with a client that  has multiple locations across the nation, and they recently merged all of the location sites into one site. To allow the lead capture forms to pre-populate the locations, they are using the query string  /?location=cityname on every page. EXAMPLE - www.example.com/product www.example.com/product/?location=nashville www.example.com/product/?location=chicago There are thirty locations across the nation, so, every page x 30 is being flagged as duplicate content... at least in the crawl through MOZ. Does using that query string actually cause a duplicate content problem?

                    Technical SEO | Sep 3, 2015, 4:55 AM | Rooted
                    1
                  • Lina500

                    How does Google view duplicate photo content?

                    Now that we can search by image on Google and see every site that is using the same photo, I assume that Google is going to use this as a signal for ranking as well. Is that already happening? I ask because I have sold many photos over the years with first-use only rights, where I retain the copyright. So I have photos on my site that I own the copyright for that are on other sites (and were there first). I am not sure if I should make an effort to remove these photos from my site or if I can wait another couple years.

                    Technical SEO | Jun 5, 2015, 9:20 AM | Lina500
                    0
                  • Digital-DMG

                    How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?

                    Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen

                    Technical SEO | Mar 16, 2015, 11:43 AM | Digital-DMG
                    0
                  • KarlBantleman

                    .com and .co.uk duplicate content

                    hi mozzers I have a client that has just released a .com version of their .co.uk website. They have basically re-skinned the .co.uk version with some US amends so all the content and title tags are the same. What you do recommend? Canonical tag to the .co.uk version? rewrite titles?

                    Technical SEO | May 7, 2014, 5:38 AM | KarlBantleman
                    0
                  • RoxBrock

                    Do I use /es/, /mx/ or /es-mx/ for my Spanish site for Mexico only

                    I currently have the Spanish version of my site under myurl.com/es/ When I was at Pubcon in Vegas last year a panel reviewed my site and said the Spanish version should be in /mx/ rather than /es/ since es is for Spain only and my site is for Mexico only. Today while trying to find information on the web I found /es-mx/ as a possibility. I am changing my site and was planning to change to /mx/ but want confirmation on the correct way to do this. Does anyone have a link to Google documentation that will tell me for sure what to use here? The documentation I read led me to the /es/ but I cannot find that now.

                    Technical SEO | Mar 18, 2014, 2:53 PM | RoxBrock
                    0
                  • Allstar

                    Location Based Content / Googlebot

                    Our website has local content specialized to specific cities and states. The url structure of this content is as follows: www.root.com/seattle www.root.com/washington When a user comes to a page, we are auto-detecting their IP and sending them directly to the relevant location based page - much the way that Yelp does. Unfortunately, what appears to be occurring is that Google comes in to our site from one of its data centers such as San Jose and is being routed to the San Jose page. When a user does a search for relevant keywords, in the SERPS they are being sent to the location pages that it appears that bots are coming in from. If we turn off the auto geo, we think that Google might crawl our site better, but users would then be show less relevant content on landing. What's the win/win situation here? Also - we also appear to have some odd location/destination pages ranking high in the SERPS. In other words, locations that don't appear to be from one of Google's data center. No idea why this might be happening. Suggestions?

                    Technical SEO | Jul 23, 2012, 6:48 AM | Allstar
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.