How do fix twin home pages
-
Search engine analysis is indicating that my site has twin home pages (www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com).
The error message I'm getting is: "your website resides at both www.mysite.com and mysite.com.
My uploaded index page is a .htm page (not .html). I don't know if that matters.
Can someone explain how this happened and what I can do to fix it?
Thanks!
-
Hi FinalFrontier,
I agree with setting up a 301 redirect to a single version. I also recommend doing the following:
- Set up canonical URLs to your desired version
- Ensure that your XML sitemaps use your desired version
- Add both www and non-www to Google Webmaster Tools and select one as the URL you'd like displayed in search results
Best of luck!
Chris
-
If you look at the redirect code the webhost provided in their instructions, I notiched there is not a [NC] at the end of the Rewrite Cond line. I'm not sure if that [NC] is necessary or not.
Other than that and the possible time-lag you speak of, I'm at a loss.
-
It could just be a time-lag in our data (and that wouldn't shock me), but run a header checker and make sure the 301 is working properly. For example, try this:
-
Well, this isn't making any sense.
I made the following change to my .htaccess file - followed the instructions given my my web host:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Then I ran another seoMoz root crawl a couple hours later and it still said I had the same errors on my home page (duplicate home page content and titles).
I just checked my .htaccess file again and it did save those 301 redirect changes. So why am I still getting duplicate page errors? thx.
-
Yeah, it sounds like you're not currently having major issues. I think it's good to prevent these issues (and duplicates are a real concern), but you can ease into this one, I strongly suspect.
-
Thanks for your post.
Google is indexing all my www pages (including www.mysite.com), but (I guess this is good news?) no documents show up for the:
site:mysite.com -url:www
in Google.
-
Since this issue can occur site-wide, I do tend to agree with Anton that 301-redirects are a better solution for this particular problem (although canonical tags will work, if that's your only feasible option). It is important, as implied in the comments, to make sure hat your internal links are consistent and you aren't using both versions in your site (although, with "www" vs. non-www, that's pretty rare).
Practically, it depends a lot on the size of your site, whether you have links to both versions, and whether Google has indexed both version. This is a problem in theory, but it may not currently be a problem on your site. You can check the indexed pages of both the root domain and www subdomain separately in Google with these commands:
site:mysite.com inurl:www
site:mysite.com -inurl:www
(the first pulls up anything with "www", and the second only pages without it).
If you're seeing both in play, then sorting out how to do the 301-redirects is a good bet. If you're not, then it's still a solid preventive measure, but you don't need to panic.
-
It can have a pretty major impact on search rankings. Basically what's happening is you have two identical pages for every intended page on your site. So it creates duplicate content issues.
So for example...
Someone finds something on your site that they like at www.yoursite.com/example/ and links to it from their site or shares it on Twitter, which increases the ranking power for that page.
Another person finds the same content at yoursite.com/example/ and links to it as well.
Instead of consolidating all the benefits of links to your site onto a single page, you're basically reducing your ranking potential by 50%.
-
How big of an issue is this for search engines? I'm indexed in Bing, Google, Yahoo.
I'm curious as to how big (or small) an impact this really has on a website.
thx.
-
Hi Final Frontier,
Most hosting providers will likely add this to your .htaccess file for you if you contact technical support. I know HostGator will happily provide that kind of help. If not, I'd be glad to add the lines if you'll download the file and email it to me.
-
Thanks but I'm more confused now than ever and I don't know how to change a .htaccess file, so I don't want to turn this into a DYI project and screw things up even more. I get the gist of what the problem is.
All my internal pages link back to www.mysite.com and to www.mysite.com/pages.htm throughout the site.
However, I noticed that for a img src for a facebook page (external link in my site), I am mistakenly linking that to http://mysite.com/facebook (no www). So I'll at least fix that to include www so there's consistency. Not sure if that's related to the problem - there are not other pages I've seen that link to http://mysite.com instead of www.mysite.com.
I've learned a lot here, but this is one technical thing I don't want to do myself and make things worse.
-
From: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not
There is usually a better solution
The canonical tag is not a replacement for a solid site architecture that doesn’t create duplicate content in the first place. There is almost always a superior solution to the canonical tag from a pure SEO best practice perspective.
Lets go through some of the URL examples I provided above, this time we'll talk about how to fix themwithout the canonical tag.
Example 1: http://www.example.com/quality-wrenches.htm
This is a duplicate version because our example website resolves with both the www version and the non-www version. If the canonical tag was used to pull the www version out of the index (keeping the non-www version as the canonical one) both versions would still resolve in the browser. With both versions still resolving, both versions can still continue to generate links.
A canonical tag, as with a 301 redirect, does not pass all of the link value from one page to another. It passes most of it, but not all. We estimate that the link value loss with either of these solutions is 1-10%. In this way, a 301 redirect and a canonical tag are the same.
I'd recommend a 301 redirect instead of a canonical tag.
Why, you ask? A 301 redirect takes the link value loss hit once. Once a 301 is in place, a user never lands on the duplicate URL version. They are redirected to the canonical version. If they decide to link to the page, they are going to provide that link to the canonical version. No link love lost. Compare that to the canonical tag solution which keeps both URLs resolving and perpetuates the link value loss.
From Rand's Article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
- Whereas a 301 redirect re-points all traffic (bots and human visitors), the Canonical URL tag is just for engines, meaning you can still separately track visitors to the unique URL versions.
- A 301 is a much stronger signal that multiple pages have a single, canonical source. While the engines are certainly planning to support this new tag and trust the intent of site owners, there will be limitations. Content analysis and other algorithmic metrics will be applied to ensure that a site owner hasn't mistakenly or manipulatively applied the tag, and we certainly expect to see mistaken use of the tag, resulting in the engines maintaining those separate URLs in their indices (meaning site owners would experience the same problems noted below).
- 301s carry cross-domain functionality, meaning you can redirect a page at domain1.com to domain2.com and carry over those search engine metrics. This is NOT THE CASE with the Canonical URL tag, which operates exclusively on a single root domain (it will carry over across subfolders and subdomains).
Rel Canonical is a great tool, but I have to disagree here. www.mysite.com is a sub-domain of mysite.com. Adding rel canonical tags to every page on the site would only send a signal to search engines specifying the preferred content, but adding a 301 redirect to the root domain one time will send all traffic, robots, and link juice to the preferred domain on a permanent basis.
-
Hi!
An easier way to fix the problem is by Canonical tags (if you´re not familiar with htaccess or server side scripts).
You find Rand Fishkins amazing article about it here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemapsGood luck!
-
Hi FinalFrontier,
To fix this, you'll just need to choose which version of the domain you'd like to use and then implement a 301 redirect from the domain you don't want displayed to the preferred domain.
My personal choice is the "naked domain" (no "www"). Technically speaking, www.mysite.com is a subdomain of mysite.com and you'll notice that almost every major brand advertises their site without the "www".
When's the last time you saw an Apple commercial trying to convince you to go to www.apple.com? Seen www.eharmony.com anywhere lately?
The choice however is up to you... the key thing is make the decision and when you link to your site from another location stick with one or the other.
To implement the 301 redirect, the most common method is to edit the .htaccess file in the root directory of your site. Also, many hosting control panels (like cPanel) have this functionality built in where it can simply be activated by choosing the appropriate option in your server's configuration.
For www to non-www simply add this to your .htaccess file (replace mysite.com with your own domain)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
For the opposite (non-www to www) add this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Hope this helps!
Anthony
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
-
Home Page Deindexed overnight?
Hi, Hope you guys can help. I run an e-commerce site https://alloywheels.com Last night our home page (and a few other pages, but not all) were de-indexed by Google. The site has been ranking (UK) for years in P1 for the "alloy wheels" keyword and on the whole been running very successfully. However recently I have noticed from fluctuation on the "alloy wheels" keyword, dropping to P3 then P5 then back to P3, but this morning I noticed we were not even ranking on the first page. When I check inside Search Console there are no messages or warnings but the "/" page was de-indexed. There were a few other key pages that were also de-indexed. I have request reindexing and they have come back, P7 for the home page for "alloy wheels" The only thing I have changed was I realised yesterday there was no robots.txt on the site and was being recommended by web.dev to add one, so I did. It was just an allow all: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | JamesDolden
Disallow Sitemap: https://alloywheels.com/sitemap.xml I ran tests on the robots.txt before it was uploaded and it all came green. I have removed the robots.txt for now. Has anybody seen anything like this before? With the recent ranking fluctuation I am not sure whether it is to do with that, the robots.txt or something different altogether? Thanks in advance, James0 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Duplicate Page Errors
Hey guys, I'm wondering if anyone can help... Here is my issue... Our website:
Technical SEO | | TCPReliable
http://www.cryopak.com
It's built on Concrete 5 CMS I'm noticing a ton of duplicate page errors (9530 to be exact). I'm looking at the issues and it looks like it is being caused by the CMS. For instance the home page seems to be duplicating.. http://www.cryopak.com/en/
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=67
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=25
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=4
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=66 Do you think this is an issue? Is their anyway to fix this issue? It seems to be happening on every page. Thanks Jim0 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Page feedback
We recently wrote a new website page to cover the direct mail services our organization offers. We kept the title tag to 70 characters, the meta description under 150 characters. H1 tag has what we feel is the most important term. If anyone out there has time to review & provide a little feedback, we'd really appreciate it. It would be great to know if it is built well and providing a solid end user experience. http://www.cushingco.com/print_products/additional_services/direct_mail.shtml At the moment, the only links pointing to this page are from our blog. One bit of content I am contemplating is a short paragraph - What is Direct Mail Marketing? Literally providing a short definition of it. The page was activated last Thursday and showing up in some Google results on the 4th/5th page but I am thinking this is probably just a temporary bump for now. Anyway, thanks in advance for any advice!!!
Technical SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
When Is It Good To Redirect Pages on Your Site to Another Page?
Suppose you have a page on your site that discusses a topic that is similar to another page but targets a different keyword phrase. The page has medium quality content, no inbound links, and the attracts little traffic. Should you 301 redirect the page to a stronger page?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
How To SEO Mobile Pages?
hello, I have finally put my first foot on the path of trying to learn and understand mobile SEO. I have a few questions regarding mobile SEO and how it works, so please help me out. I use wordpress for my site, and there is a nifty plugin called WP touch http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ What it basically does is, it converts your desktop version into a mobile friendly version. I wanted to know that if it does that, does this mean whatever SEO i do for my regular web site gets accomplished for my moible version as well? Another simple question is, if i search for the same term on my mobile phone then on my desktop how different will the SERs be? thanks moz peeps
Technical SEO | | david3050 -
Too many on page links for WP blog page
Hello, I have set my WP blog to a page so new posts go to that page making it the blog. On a SEOmoz campaign crawl, it says there are too many links on one page, so does this mean that as I am posting my blog posts to this page, the search engines are seeing the page as one page with links instead of the blog posts? I worry that if I continue to add more posts (which obviously I want to) the links will increase more and more, meaning that they will be discounted due to too many links. What can I do to rectify this? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | mozUser14692366292850