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 fix duplicate content for homepage and index.html
-
Hello,
I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.
Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page).
According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical
I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above.
Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!
-
OK, Paul, I hear what you are saying. It's a very open and obvious diss.
I'm not sure what you are saying makes any difference to the argument that the canonical way here is not the way to go. I was explaining in the simplest way, I would not want, and I'm sure you would not want either, a live page like this - the home page, live and canonicalised.
(It's a given that the canonical works like a 301, passing link juice to the preferred version.)
So thanks but it makes no difference - delete & 301 every time.
Google is heightening its distrust of canonicals - the new Seach Console tool reveals which pages are the preferred canonical and it's something of a surprise to SEOs!
If you feel like playing top trumps again then why not PM me? - it's so much better and the uninitiated do not need to see it!
Cheers Nigel
-
A proper canonical tag does a lot more than "just be telling Google not to rank it" When used properly (i.e. pages that truly do contain the same content), the canonicalised page passes its ranking signals back to the canonical source.
I agree with Kristina - while a 301 would be preferable (it's a directive, while canonical tags are taken as suggestions), a canonical tag would be vastly better than not doing anything about the issue. At least until the dev can get the problem with the 301-redirect properly resolved.
Paul
-
It's best practice to redirect, but if that's not an option, the canonical route should help the problem a lot! You'll probably lose some link equity with this route, but it should clear up duplicate content issues from Google's side.
-
Hi Dre
If you just do a canonical then the page will still be live, you will just be telling Google not to rank it. Best practice is to remove it all together and 301. It is bad practice having more than one version of your home page, (any page) live!
Regards Nigel
-
Thank you so much for all the responses. So it sounds like 301 redirect through htaccess is the way to go. What is the difference between using the 301 through htaccess vs using rel=canonical in my case? Does the 301 provide better link juice vs rel=canonical or is canonical just not applicable in this case? Thanks for all the replies and helpful suggestions again!
EDIT: I spoke to my developer (who is hosting and maintaining my site now).. he said he tried to do 301 through htaccess but it seems to be crashing the site (and trust me he is very good at what he does). Part of the problem is that my site is VERY old (originally build about 10 years ago and NOT updated once since).. he has been slowly updating and cleaning up the site slowly and he will try to figure out why the 301 is crashing the site and not working but in the mean time how safe is it to use rel=canonical instead of a 301?
Thanks again!
-
Hi dre
Your site really shouldn't be generating an index.html in the first place but if it is you must make sure that there is a 301 in the htaccess file sending all traffic to the single homepage URL as Lynn correctly points out this will be a permanent redirect.
It is very simple to do. Both versions are treated as separate pages (as http and https) so you are essentially showing a duplicate site to Google so your rankings will be terrible until you change.
Regards Nigel
-
Hello there,
You can use .htaccess URL rewrite to remove all the .html from your URL, here's the rewrite rules.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]Once you added this rules you should also fix all your internal links make sure they link to the URL without .html
Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap
-
"I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page" - great! Also, you should check if your inner pages redirecting from HTTP-versions to HTTPS too.
index.html should redirect to the homepage main version with 301 Permanent Redirect.
-
Google consider HTTP and HTTPS as two separate protocols. Since the contents are same on both versions, google bots consider it as duplicate content. Adding a canonical URL will solve this problem. If you have any doubts, feel free to ask.
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 in sidebar
Hi guys. So I have a few sentences (about 50 words) of duplicate content across all pages of my website (this is a repeatable text in sidebar). Each page of my website contains about 1300 words (unique content) in total, and 50 words of duplicate content in sidebar. Does having a duplicate content of this length in sidebar affect the rankings of my website in any way? Thank you so much for your replies.
On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov1 -
Does homepage SEO exist at all?
hi Just read a Yoast article explaining that the homepage should never be optimized for a specific keyword and should only be optimized for its business or brand name. i have a large site that I'd like to rank (or increase traffic for as I know people get irritated with that term now) for 'Campervan hire'. It has plenty of sub pages going after 'Campervan hire 'location'' for example. it makes sense to me for the homepage keyword - my core keyword - to be 'Campervan hire' and for the homepage to be optimised for this. However, the article I've just read (https://yoast.com/homepage-seo/) suggests a separate page for this keyword. What are your thoughts pls?? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | CamperConnect142 -
How do I fix duplicate page issue on Shopify with duplicate products because of collections.
I'm working with a new client with a site built on Shopify. Most of their products appear in four collections. This is creating a duplicate content challenge for us. Can anyone suggest specific code to add to resolve this problem. I'm also interested in other ideas solutions, such as "don't use collections" if that's the best approach. I appreciate your insights. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | quiltedkoala0 -
No-index all the posts of a category
Hi everyone! I would like no-indexing all the posts of a specific category of my wordpress site. The problem is that the structure of my URL is composed without /category/: www.site-name.ext/date/post-name/
On-Page Optimization | | salvyy
so without /category-name/ Is possibile to disallow the indexing of all the posts of the category via robots.txt? Using Yoast Plugin I can put the no-index for each post, but I would like to put the no-index (or disallow/) a time for all the post of the category. Thanks in advance for your help and sorry for my english. Mike0 -
Duplicate Content with ?Page ID's in WordPress
Hi there, I'm trying to figure out the best way to solve a duplicate content problem that I have due to Page ID's that WordPress automatically assigns to pages. I know that in order for me to resolve this I have to use canonical urls but the problem for me is I can't figure out the URL structure. Moz is showing me thousands of duplicate content errors that are mostly related to Page IDs For example, this is how a page's url should look like on my site Moz is telling me there are 50 duplicate content errors for this page. The page ID for this page is 82 so the duplicate content errors appear as follows and so on. For 47 more pages. The problem repeats itself with other pages as well. My permalinks are set to "Post Name" so I know that's not an issue. What can I do to resolve this? How can I use canonical URLs to solve this problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SpaMedica0 -
If I enbed the same video from my YouTube account on two different websites, will I get a duplicate content penalty?
I have a YouTube video I want to show my B2B and B2C customers. But I have a different websites for each. If I embed the video will I get duplicate content strike against me?
On-Page Optimization | | RoxBrock0 -
Duplicate Content from on Competitor's site?
I've recently discovered large blocks of content on a competitors site that has been copy and pasted from a client's site. From what I know, this will only hurt the competitor and not my client since my guy was the original. Is this true? Is there any risk to my client? Should we take action? Dino
On-Page Optimization | | Dino640 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0