A crawl revealed two home pages
-
After doing a site crawl using the moz tool, I have found two home pages-www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com. Both URLS have the exact same metrics and I have set a preferred domain name in google, will this hurt seo? Should I claim the www.domain.com/ as well as www.domain.com and domain.com in the search console?
Thanks
-
you guys are awesome! Thank you.
-
Just double check in a clean browser (with history cleared & F5) or in incognito mode to check the default.
Sounds good Tom!
-
Thanks Niglel, after doing a little investigating, I believe google search console may have added in the backslash for formatting reasons. It appears with a backslash in home view, where you can see domains, however when viewing preferred domain, it does not appear with a backslash. To test this I used a practice site and added it in without a backslash, following my submission google added in a backslash under the domain view.
So I should be set?
Thanks!
-
Hi Tom
It will still be there but will slowly decline as the new format one takes over. You won't lose anything, GSC just tracks. You will see the non-trailing slash data begin to populate over the next few weeks.
Regards
Nigel
-
Thanks Nigel, what will happen to the existing data under the view of the current preferred domain with the backslash if I switch the preferred domain to no backslash? I worry that the existing data will be erased or not transferred.
-
Hi Tom
If it redirects to www.domain.com then that must also be set up in GSC as that is now the preferred domain format. It looks better as well without the trailing slash.
Regards
Nigel
-
Thank you for the fast responses.
Currently, "www.domain.com/" has been claimed and set as preferred, all search console data appears on this account. (www and backslash)
"domain.com/" has also been claimed, with no data on this view.---(non www)
However, as stated, "www.domain.com/" (Preferred and with backslash) redirects to www.domain.com. So as per suggestions I should add "www.domain.com", should this now be my preferred domain?
Thanks guys!
-
Hi Tom
Moz will not reveal a 301 unless there is a nasty redirect chain. If you use Screaming Frog it will reveal all the directives for every page.
There must be a redirect but it might be worth checking if it's a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) - it should be 301.
The good news is that it is redirecting.
As Martijn suggests you should add the preferred one to Search Console. It doesn't 'do' anything but you will be able to see both versions.
Regards Nigel
-
We are currently HTTP, however the page domain.com/ seems to redirect to domain.com, as I can not access domain.com/ without it bringing me to domain.com (sorry for the redundancy). However, the moz crawl did not reveal a 301. Does this resolve the duplicate content issue? Thanks for the fast answers.
-So far www and non www have been claimed only.
-
In addition to what Nigel is suggesting I would also recommend to claim www.example.com and example.com, if you used to have a HTTP site and have moved over the last years to HTTPS I would recommend using that to verify as well. All of this gives you the best insight.
This is only worth fixing as it's usually an easy change that needs to be made, right now it won't hurt you as there are so many other issues that have way more weight for a search engine. This particular one is one that millions of sites have.
-
Hi Profitect
These are two separate home pages and duplicate each other so do have the potential to kill all of your SEO efforts as they are seen as separate pages by Google.
You will need to put a directive in the htaccess file to move all traffic to one of the other. It's a two-minute job for a developer.
This would move all URL's to a trailing sash format. (Assuming the site is https)
<code><ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$ #Force Trailing slash RewriteRule ^((.*)[^/])$ $1/ [L,R=301]</ifmodule></code>
Regards
Nigel
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
-
How to stop crawls for product review pages? Volusion site
Hi guys, I have a new Volusion website. the template we are using has its own product review page for EVERY product i sell (1500+) When a customer purchases a product a week later they receive a link back to review the product. This link sends them to my site, but its own individual page strictly for reviewing the product. (As oppose to a page like amazon, where you review the product on the same page as the actual listing.) **This is creating countless "duplicate content" and missing "title" errors. What is the most effective way to block a bot from crawling all these pages? Via robots txt.? a meta tag? ** Here's the catch, i do not have access to every individual review page, so i think it will need to be blocked by a robot txt file? What code will i need to implement? i need to do this on my admin side for the site? Do i also have to do something on the Google analytics side to tell google about the crawl block? Note: the individual URLs for these pages end with: *****.com/ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode=458VB Can i create a block for all url's that end with /ReviewNew.asp etc. etc.? Thanks! Pardon my ignorance. Learning slowly, loving MOZ community 😃 1354bdae458d2cfe44e0a705c4ec38dd
Technical SEO | | Jerrion0 -
On-Page Problem
Hello Mozzers, A friend has a business website and the on-page stuff is done really bad. He wants to rank for: conference room furnishing, video conference, digital signage. (Don't worry about the keywords, it's just made up for an example.) For these three services he has a page: hiswebsite.com/av AV stands for audio and video and is the h1. If you click on one of the service, the url doesn't change. Like if you click on video conference, just the text changes, the url stays /av. All his targeted pages got an F Grade, I am not surprised, the services titles are in . Wouldn't it be a lot better to make an own page for every service with a targeted keyword, like hiswebsite.com/video-conference All this stuff is on /av, how will a 301 resirect work to all the service pages, does this make sense? Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | grobro1 -
"One Page With Two Links To Same Page; We Counted The First Link" Is this true?
I read this to day http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 I thought to myself, yep, thats what I been reading in Moz for years ( pitty Matt could not confirm that still the case for 2014) But reading though the comments Michael Martinez of http://www.seo-theory.com/ pointed out that Mat says "...the last time I checked, was 2009, and back then -- uh, we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page."
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays
Which would imply that is does not not mean it always the first link. Michael goes on to say "Back in 2008 when Rand WRONGLY claimed that Google was only counting the first link (I shared results of a test where it passed anchor text from TWO links on the same page)" then goes on to say " In practice the search engine sometimes skipped over links and took anchor text from a second or third link down the page." For me this is significant. I know people that have had "SEO experts" recommend that they should have a blog attached to there e-commence site and post blog posts (with no real interest for readers) with anchor text links to you landing pages. I thought that posting blog post just for anchor text link was a waste of time if you are already linking to the landing page with in a main navigation as google would see that link first. But if Michael is correct then these type of blog posts anchor text link blog posts would have value But who is' right Rand or Michael?0 -
Crawl Diagnostics and Duplicate Page Title
SOMOZ crawl our web site and say we have no duplicate page title but Google Webmaster Tool says we have 641 duplicate page titles, Which one is right?
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Pages extensions
Hi guys, We're in the process of moving one of our sites to a newer version of the CMS. The new version doesn't support page extensions (.aspx) but we'll keep them for all existing pages (about 8,000) to avoid redirects. The technical team is wondering about the new pages - does it make any difference if the new pages are without extensions, except for usability? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lgrozeva0 -
Wordpress Archive pages
In the SEOMOZ site report a number of errors were found. One of which was no or duplicate meta desctions on certain blog pages. When I drilled down to find these i noticed thosepages are the wordpress autocreated archive pages. When I searched for these through the wordpress control panel through both pages and blogs they were nowhere to be found. Does anyone know how to find these pages or are they not something I need to worry about?
Technical SEO | | laserclinics0 -
Duplicate Version of Home Page Causing Problems?
Hello, I have a .php based site and i'm curious if how we split traffic is negatively affecting our rankings. Currently, if you visit Lipozene.com you are split 50/50 between two pages, indexa.php and indexb.php. These have identical content right now, and i'm curious if this has negatively affected our rankings. We've dropped off the SERPs for our brand term "lipozene" even though we are the official site and own www.lipozene.com . Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | lipoweb0 -
Dynamic page
I have few pages on my site that are with this nature /locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this "According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " ) _http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems" I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.0