Home page duplicate content...
-
Hello all!
I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end:
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page?
rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />
-
Hi Liam,
If you have a mix of slash and no-slash URL's, just make sure that they all forward correctly.
If you go to www.example.com/product/, does that forward correctly to www.example.com/product, or what does it do?
If you wish to PM me your URL, I will happily do a quick crawl to make sure there is nothing else that might cause you issues.
-Andy
-
No problem Liam,
You can safely canonical your home page to itself. I've had 2 sites setup that way for a few years now.
Good luck,
Don
-
I didn't want to force the removal or the append of a forward slash site-wide because "most" URL's (around 5,000 of them) don't use forward slash (products, categories, pages etc) - but there's a few pages that are part of the CMS such as account, billing, shopping cart etc that do use an appending forward slash. I think I'm going to give the canonical tag a shot for now - I can't see there being any negatives of using it on the home page to point to itself - it's just I've not heard of many people have to use it on the home page!
EDIT: Interesting. I viewed the source of http://www.moz.com/? - to see if they were using a home page canonical tag, and they were!
-
HI Liam,
Yes you can fix this with a canonical tag or you can do a blanket fix that redirects all "/" urls to the non-slash version with .htaccess.
This should work in the .htaccess file
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
Hope it helps,
Don
-
Hi Liam,
To enforce a no trailing slash policy sitewide, you need to do this in the .htaccess file. You do this by adding the following:
**`RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]`** If you wanted to enforce a trailing slash policy, you would instead add this.
RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f RewriteRule^(.*[^/])$ /$1/[L,R=301]
-Andy
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
-
'duplicate content' on several different pages
Hi, I've a website with 6 pages identified as 'duplicate content' because they are very similar. This pages looks similar because are the same but it show some pictures, a few, about the product category that's why every page look alike each to each other but they are not 'exactly' the same. So, it's any way to indicate to Google that the content is not duplicated? I guess it's been marked as duplicate because the code is 90% or more the same on 6 pages. I've been reviewing the 'canonical' method but I think is not appropriated here as the content is not the same. Any advice (that is not add more content)?
Technical SEO | | jcobo0 -
Is this duplicate content that I should be worried about?
Our product descriptions appear in two places and on one page they appear twice. The best way to illustrate that would be to link you to a search results page that features one product. My duplicate content concern refers to the following, When the customer clicks the product a pop-up is displayed that features the product description (first showing of content) When the customer clicks the 'VIEW PRODUCT' button the product description is shown below the buy buytton (second showing of content), this is to do with the template of the page and is why it is also shown in the pop-up. This product description is then also repeated further down in the tabs (third showing of content). My thoughts are that point 1 doesn't matter as the content isn't being shown from a dedicated URL and it relies on javascript. With regards to point 2, is the fact the same paragraph appears on the page twice a massive issue and a duplicate content problem? Thanks
Technical SEO | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Possible duplicate content issue with my Blog and archive pages . Any help greatly appreciated
Dear Mozzers, I have been looking at my news section on my eCommerce site and I think I may have a duplicate content issue and wanted some advice on whether I do and if so , how best I handle this. http://www.website.co.uk/news
Technical SEO | | PeteC12
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:1
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:2
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:3
http://www.website.co.uk/news/limit:9999 (This is show all) I also have the ability of showing articles by month : http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/04 (April)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/03 (March)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/02 (Feb)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/01 (Jan) I am wondering if there's a duplicate issue here or not given that I also articles by month as well and if so how best I handle this.? I already do pagination on my news pages (page 1 , page 2) by using rel=next and rel=Prev but I don't have an canconical or anything as yet. I enclose a couple of links if this would help and would appreciate if someone could take a browse. I have a View All link on my homepage for for all news items - http://goo.gl/JPPIvQ I which have a different urls - March 2015 Articles - http://goo.gl/0O1wYD and April 2015 articles - http://goo.gl/GdW2oK On another note, These articles are also linked to from the relevant category landing pages on my website to help with SEO. I have not used H tags on the article links in my landing pages , just displaying the weblink back to the news article.I've done this to try and improve the PR and rankings of my landing pages. Just wondered if anyone has any comments as to whether thats a good or bad idea and whether I could improve it in any way - An example is here (scroll down the page to the pressure washing guides) - http://goo.gl/nnRE49 Thanks Pete0 -
Duplicate Content within Site
I'm very new here... been reading a lot about Panda and duplicate content. I have a main website and a mobile site (same domain - m.domain.com). I've copied the same text over to those other web pages. Is that okay? Or is that considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
How do I deal with Duplicate content?
Hi, I'm trying SEOMOZ and its saying that i've got loads of duplicate content. We provide phone numbers for cities all over the world, so have pages like this... https://www.keshercommunications.com/Romaniavoipnumbers.html https://www.keshercommunications.com/Icelandvoipnumbers.html etc etc. One for every country. The question is, how do I create pages for each one without it showing up as duplicate content? Each page is generated by the server, but Its impossible to write unique text for each one. Also, the competition seem to have done the same but google is listing all their pages when you search for 'DID Numbers. Look for DIDWW or MyDivert.
Technical SEO | | DanFromUK0 -
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!
Technical SEO | | finalfrontier0 -
Duplicate Content and Canonical use
We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin
Technical SEO | | Martin_S0