Duplicate Content after Moz Site Audit

[jjimen03]

Hello folks,

So I signed up for the trial version of the Moz tool and ran an initial site audit. One of the site audit results is confusing me.
It reports that there are two pages with duplicate content ( Each page has a duplicate page with duplicate content in it).
When I take a look at what those pages are, here is what I see:

mysite.com/Contact-Us.html
mysite.com/contact-us.html
( The difference in the above is the Contact and Us, the first letters are capitalized on one of the URLS)

mysite.com/index.html
mysite.com

Now I am confused because for one thing, I don't have 2 Contact Us html files uploaded on my hosting server.
Why is Moz seeing 2 Contact Us pages? How to remove one?

Regarding my home page, why is it flagging the same page as two different pages? How to remove of them?

[ATP]

Sure thing,

Using a canonical only would still let you access mysite.com/index.html and would display that url in the browser. This means 2 things, firstly a user can see this url (and it can look a little messy) if they happen to find their way onto this page and 2, they may link to your website using this url (many people copy and paste links from the browser window). Whilst this isn't a problem as the canonical would pass link juice anyway it makes things a little "messy".

A 301 would do exactly the same as the canonical in terms of passing link juice etc but it wouldn't let the user access mysite.com/index.html  they would be redirected to mysite.com  removing the possibility anyone would see or link to  index.html

Both solutions fix your problem, one is just a little neater.

[jjimen03]

No worries on the delayed response. It is important to enjoy your weekend!

Regarding the 301 redirect, now I must ask, what do you mean by "neater" in the browser?

Just trying to get all the information and understand what I am doing before I go ahead and modify anything.

Appreciate the help.

[ATP]

Hi Jorge, sorry for the delay responding i was away for the weekend.

You most likely don't have any links pointing the   mysite.com/index.html

Index.html is the default hompage for most websites. mysite.com  technically points to a folder and searches for the index.html file within this folder. As such, both address for your homepage are nearly always found.

A canonical will fix this, if you have the non-www version as your preferred domain go with

Many people prefer to 301 redirect this page as its neater in the browser. But the canonical will do the job.

[jjimen03]

ATP,

Thank you for the information. So I did a bit of poking around on the site and found that on a few pages, the Contact-Us.html link was in fact capitalized on some pages and on others it was not. I proceeded to capitalize the first letters of each word on all the link references on all the pages, and re-ran the site audit, and the tool no longer flags the Contact-Us pages as being duplicates. Great stuff.

I then proceeded to look for links in any of my pages which have either www.mysite.com or www.mysite.com/index.html and did not find any differences. All of the links in the code are pointing to the home page using: 

So if I understand the fix correctly, I would have to go to my index.html page and in the header insert the following:

[This would tell the search engines that the real version and all the "link juice" should go to www.mysite.com.

Which brings up another question, should I use the www. version or the non-www. version? See I have the non www. version as my preferred domain set in my hosting provider, as well as in Google Webmaster Tools ( Google Search Console ).](/index.html)

[ATP]

Hi Jorge,

lets take it from the top

Moz tries to show you, and report on how google would see you site.

When you type in a url, the browser and server holding and displaying the website doesn't care if you use capitals or lowercase, for their purpose it is the same page. This is why you will have only created this page once on whatever web platform you are using. However, google sees them differently, each one as a different page.

You could access this page from any combination of capital letters even something stupid like

mysite.com/CoNtAcT-Us.html

These hundred of variations are never picked up on simply because we dont use them.

Lets presume you wanted the the page to be reachable at  "mysite.com/contact-us.html" and made it this way. The reason the second variation has been picked up on is most likely because you have used it (or someone else has) to link to that page. Somewhere somebody will have  Link Text

Because of this link the second variation is found and because google treats it as a different page, moz is reporting it as a different page.

It is a similiar case with your

mysite.com
mysite.com/index.html

Is is the same page accessible at 2 different urls.

To combat this, you need to use a solution such as

1. Canonical Tags (Recomended)

On your homepage get this code inserted between the tags

On your contact page get this code inserted between the tags

This will cause all versions of this page that are "accidentally made" to say "Hey, im just a copy of this page"

2. 301 Redirects
 The second solution is to put a 301 redirect in place, this varies depending on what web platform you are on. This simply redirects the user and any crawl bot to the intented page

i.e.  someone tries to go to   mysite.com/index.html and your website stops it loading and sends them to mysite.com

This is normally done by editing your htaaccess file. If you want to go this road tell us what platform you website is on and we can give you instructions.