Duplicate Content aka 301 redirect from .com to .com/index.html
-
Moz reports are telling me that I have duplicate content on the home page because .com and .com/index.html are being seen as two pages. I have implemented 301 redirect using various codes I found online, but nothing seems to work. Currently I'm using this code.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^jacksonvilleacservice.com
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ [L,R=301]Nothing is changing. What am I doing wrong? I have given it several weeks but report stays the same. Also according to webmasters tools they can't see this as duplicate content. What am I doing wrong?
-
Thank you very much. I have implemented your suggestions and we'll see how it goes. Thanks again.
-
All of the answers here have pretty much outlined what you should do in this situation, but I thought I'd sum it all up here:
-
You probably don't need to redirect /index.html to www.jacksonvilleacservice.com of the website for the homepage, since it can be tricky. Instead, make sure that:
-
All internal links pointing to the homepage go to ttp://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com rather than the /index.html page
-
The homepage canonicals to the www.jacksonvilleacservice.com with_out_ the /index.html
-
If you want to be doubly sure, you can use the code Doug provided.
-
Other commenters have also noticed, a potentially bigger issue is that you're creating two copies of your site by allowing visitors to reach your site with or without a "www" before the URL. For that you will need to create a 301 redirect, and you should canonical to be doubly sure.
Good luck!
-
-
My preference tends to be to redirect such pages to the domain rather than the other way round. You'll find that people naturally link to the domain (without the path) so making that the canonical version makes sense. It also means that you can future-proof your site somewhat. (What happens when your change the content management system and instead of an index.html for your home page, you've not got an index.php page...)
So, my recommendation would be to make sure that all internal links to the home page on your own site point to http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ and set up a redirect from the index.html to the domain.
Then you'd use something like the following to redirect the index.html to the main page:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]Another tool to check your headers and that your redirects are in place is: http://web-sniffer.net/
It also appears that you've got a problem with both the www and non-www versions of the page responsing with a 200 response code.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]If you look at your inbound links using Open Site Explorer, you'll see that you've got a mix of links pointing to either http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ or http://jacksonvilleacservice.com/.
(There don't appear to be any external links show in OSE linking to your /index.html page)
-
Ok, first thing let’s not reply on report only and check some online 301 redirection checker to see if your redirection code is working or not! Here is a tool by SEObook that allows you to check the header status of any URL http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/
Redirection code is very much depends upon what website are you using like PHP, wordpress, ASP or anything else the redirection code will be different as PHP and ASP are different languages and for WP there are tons of plugins that can do your work!
My advice would be to search for “how to redirect (website’s language)” and I am sure there will be some articles that have explained the step by step process. Hope this helps!
Hope this helps!
-
A 301 redirect for this can be tricky, as the other responses have said in this thread, it can create an infinite redirect loop. I'm pretty sure it can be done, but I don't have enough technical know-how to tell you what's wrong with your conf code there.
A simple way around this is to put a rel=canonical tag in the of your home page, pointing at your root directory (i.e. "/"). You can include this in the in the file, so it'll show up when the page is accessed under both / and for /index.html. The HTML for this would look like: . Make sure your internal links point to the canonical version, as this method may lose you a little pagerank (pagerank coming from /index.html to /).
You have a canonicalization problem for your subdomain too... meaning you're serving the same content for both http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com (with www) and http://jacksonvilleacservice.com (without www). I'd pick one, and then do 301 redirects from one to the other, rather than solving that issue with canonical tags.
-
I agree with Eric it would be a good idea to link to your root domain and not the specific file. You can just link to yourdomain.com or build your links to your homepage using code similar to the following: Home.
I have also seen instances where yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are treated as separate pages and cause similar problems. It appears you are using www.yourdomain.com so while you are messing with 301 redirects you might want to add one from yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com for all URLs in case a link is made to yourdomain.com.
-
Since index.html is most likely your home page (it's the default home page on your web server), then you really don't need to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect in this situation. The only thing you need to do is make sure that on your website you don't have any links pointing to www.yourdomain.com/index.html. Rather, all of those links should be pointing to www.yourdomain.com as the home page.
If you set up a redirect from index.html to your site's home page www.domain.com then you'll probably create a "loop" that won't work. If you find all the links to /index.html and fix those then that will be enough to take care of this.
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
-
Use H2 or H3 for Six Ways to Hip Thrust https://www.fitness-china.com/hip-thrust
Our article about Hip Thrust https://www.fitness-china.com/hip-thrust We have sex tips about how to hip thrust. that use h2. but Final Words use h3 or h2?
On-Page Optimization | | ahislop5740 -
301 Redirects From a URL without Keyphrases to one With Keyphrases
I have a client that sells services. Each service offered currently has a URL structure like this: www.companyname.com/product/asp$view-id-page3022-item-24 These pages are pretty old, and I would love to have a more user-friendly URL like this: www.companyname.com/product/purple-swatch-watch If I rename the URL and do a 301 redirect, what impact will that have on search? Ideally, this page will be optimized for "purple swatch watch", but the current URL structure is so... well, you know. My apologies if this has been answered before. I tried looking through archived of 301 issues, but lost hope after my first 10 or so attempts at answered didn't help this specific issue.
On-Page Optimization | | ericav0 -
Help: my WordPress Blog generates too many onpage links and duplicate content
I have a WordPress Blog since November last year (so I'm pretty new to WordPress) and the effects on ranking for some keywords are really good. So I thought tag clouds are good. Crawl Diagnostics tell me now that I have too many onpage links for example my author page breaks the record: 256
On-Page Optimization | | inlinear
http://inlinear.com/blog/author/inlinear/ I think thats because there are links for each word in the tag cloud generated ... On this page (and many other pages) WordPress displays (teasers) the beginning of each post (read more ...) producing duplicate content and even new canonical tags.... The page titles are also too long because I installed "All in One SEO Pack" and now this plugin and wordpress itself mixes titles together ... But what can I do to avoid all this. Is there a PlugIn that can help... I think millions of blogs will have the same problems... I my blog yet has very few content. Thanks for your answers :))0 -
Summarize your question.Images being seen as duplicate content/pages
My images suddenly are appearing in my crawl reports as duplicate content, without meta tags, this happened over night and cant figure out why.
On-Page Optimization | | RBYoung0 -
How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ?
Hello, I wondered if somebody could give me some advice. The problem of various iterations of the clanedar page coming up as duplicate content. There is a large calendar on my site for events and each time the page is viewed it is seen as duplicate content . How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ? Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Tony14Aug0 -
Duplicate Content - Meta Data for International Site Roll Out
Hi All, We have a site targeting Ireland, so all on-page SEO is completed and launched on the Irish site. We are now rolling out this site to the UK...how much of this content & SEO meta data has to be changed for Google to not recognise it as duplicate content? Site structure is as follows: http://www.domain.com/ie-en/ - Irish site http://www.domain.com/uk-en/ - UK site Or will it even be considered duplicate content as we have the uk and Irish signals in the subfolders, will be using geo targeting on webmasters, and will have UK specific addresses and phone numbers? We will be rolling this site out to may more countries so would be great to get this straight from the start so we don't waste time creating many versions of the meta data unnecessarily! Many thanks Emma
On-Page Optimization | | john_Digino0 -
How do I avoid duplicate content and page title errors when using a single CMS for a website
I am currently hosting a client site on a CMS with both a Canadian and USA version of the website. We have the .com as the primary domain and the .ca is re-directed from the registrar to the Canadian home page. The problem I am having is that my campaign produces errors for duplicate page content and duplicate page titles. Is there a way to setup the two versions on the CMS so that these errors do not get produced? My concern is getting penalized from search engines. Appreciate any help. Mark Palmer
On-Page Optimization | | kpreneur0 -
What is the best duplicate content checker that will check by phrase?
I create a lot of landing pages for individual keywords on my site. An issue that I've run into is I unknowingly use some common phrases repeatedly on different pages and therefore sometimes get dinged by Google. I'm basically looking for a tool that would check the content of a new page against all the other pages on my site and check it phrase by phrase. Most of the tools I've found make you put in two URLs to check against - I need it to check against hundreds.
On-Page Optimization | | davegr0