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.
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
-
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
-
great code Josh...but , after i saved it on .htaccess , a "?" appeared on the link..
http://www.domain.com/?/example/file.html
Is this ok ? pls advice/
Thank you,
-
You touched on a good point here "We set up our site to utilize a index redirect for all of our sub directories as well, so with this method you simply name your sub directories to match the url path that you desire. Each sub directory has it's own index which you redirect with a variation of the above code. By doing this you can have nice clean url paths like http://www.semclix.com/design/ecommerce/ - and mitigate the duplicate content issue. We hope that this helps."
Too often I see sites where they get the home page right but miss the re-write on the directories.
-
Here's the .htaccess rewrite command that you can use for the index.html redirect -
Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on
Index Rewrite RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.amarasoftware.com/ [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.amarasoftware.com/$1/ [R=301,L]
We set up our site to utilize a index redirect for all of our sub directories as well, so with this method you simply name your sub directories to match the url path that you desire. Each sub directory has it's own index which you redirect with a variation of the above code. By doing this you can have nice clean url paths like http://www.semclix.com/design/ecommerce/ - and mitigate the duplicate content issue. We hope that this helps.
-
I'd check it with some other software too... i.e. Raven Tools free trial or something, that will tell you if there's canonicalization problems... of course I'm not advocating Raven Tools over SEOmoz tools (I'm a member here and not there for good reasons), I just think best to try a few different tests before deciding if it's a problem. There might just be an issue with the SEOmoz campaign tool for the moment, which I'm sure they'll fix as soon as they realise.
Hey, aren't you the tutor I had in my SEC usability course?
-
Unfortunately I can't speak for how SEOmoz handles rewrites like this if it's already crawled the page.
The rewrite rule you're using looks like it's only rewriting the www portion of the URL, not index.html. So alone it wouldn't do anything to solve dupe content issues. (someone please correct me if I'm misreading the rewrite rule)
Here's a link to what I used to write a redirect for index.html on another site.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/6375.htm
I think it is a fairly safe assumption to make that SEOmoz is smart enough to realize if you're got a redirect in there (providing that its working). I'd still recommend taking a look to see if Google has cached or indexed an index.html version, though.
Edit: my personal, highly technical, acid-test for an index.html redirect is just going there and manually entering the url with index.html on the end, rather than waiting for a recrawl to see if you're heading in the right direction.
-
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?amarasoftware.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteRule .? http://www.%1amarasoftware.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Is what I use. In Seomoz this leads to www.amarasoftware.com and index.html so 2 different URL's, both with different incoming links, and a different authority, which has an impact on my ranking if correct. in SEomoz this a returns a duplicate title and meta tags errors. If SEOmoz finds 2 pages instead of one I may assume that Google agrees with this.
-
As you did, I'd normally handle this with a 301 from index.html to the root domain. When you say that it's "not had an impact" do you mean that the SEOmoz dashboard continues to show an error after it re-crawls, or that the search engines are not picking up the redirect?
SEOmoz dashboard does a great job, but I'd check to see how the search engines are actually indexing yourdomain.com/index.html vs. yourdomain.com also. If the search engines are indexing it as you want them to, then I'd be inclined to ignore the dashboard error.
I apologize if this is a stupid question, but I assume you manually checked that the redirect worked?
-
You wish to canonicalize the pages. That is the SEO word which describes exactly what you are trying to achieve.
Above are 5 URLs which can possibly lead to the exact same page. If you add the following HTML in the code then the pages will be canonicalized.
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
-
Same product in different categories and duplicate content issues
Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone. Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia091 -
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
Case Sensitive URLs, Duplicate Content & Link Rel Canonical
I have a site where URLs are case sensitive. In some cases the lowercase URL is being indexed and in others the mixed case URL is being indexed. This is leading to duplicate content issues on the site. The site is using link rel canonical to specify a preferred URL in some cases however there is no consistency whether the URLs are lowercase or mixed case. On some pages the link rel canonical tag points to the lowercase URL, on others it points to the mixed case URL. Ideally I'd like to update all link rel canonical tags and internal links throughout the site to use the lowercase URL however I'm apprehensive! My question is as follows: If I where to specify the lowercase URL across the site in addition to updating internal links to use lowercase URLs, could this have a negative impact where the mixed case URL is the one currently indexed? Hope this makes sense! Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | allianzireland0 -
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre1 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
Hi there I have a new client who has two websites: http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | turnbullholdingsltd
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nz They are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content. What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain. Thanks in advance. Laurie0 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690