How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
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The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate?
I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'.
What has been done:
1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www.
2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version.
What I have asked the programmer to do:
1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages.
2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags.
Have all bases been covered correctly?
One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?)
Thanks a million!
**To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
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I realized the question was a bit wordy and disorganized so I reworded it and posted it here. http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-my-best-strategy-for-duplicate-content-if-only-www-pages-are-indexed
Totally answered!
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