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
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
-
Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only
Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk0 -
Home Page Deindexed overnight?
Hi, Hope you guys can help. I run an e-commerce site https://alloywheels.com Last night our home page (and a few other pages, but not all) were de-indexed by Google. The site has been ranking (UK) for years in P1 for the "alloy wheels" keyword and on the whole been running very successfully. However recently I have noticed from fluctuation on the "alloy wheels" keyword, dropping to P3 then P5 then back to P3, but this morning I noticed we were not even ranking on the first page. When I check inside Search Console there are no messages or warnings but the "/" page was de-indexed. There were a few other key pages that were also de-indexed. I have request reindexing and they have come back, P7 for the home page for "alloy wheels" The only thing I have changed was I realised yesterday there was no robots.txt on the site and was being recommended by web.dev to add one, so I did. It was just an allow all: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | JamesDolden
Disallow Sitemap: https://alloywheels.com/sitemap.xml I ran tests on the robots.txt before it was uploaded and it all came green. I have removed the robots.txt for now. Has anybody seen anything like this before? With the recent ranking fluctuation I am not sure whether it is to do with that, the robots.txt or something different altogether? Thanks in advance, James0 -
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
Moving Some Content From Page A to Page B
Page A has written content, pictures, videos. The written content from Page A is being moved to Page B. When Google crawls the pages next time around will Page B receive the content credit? Will there not be any issues that this content originally belonged to Page A? Page A is not a page I want to rank for (just have great pictures and videos for users). Can I 301 redirect from Page A to B since the written content from A has been deleted or no need? Again, I intent to keep Page A live because good value for users to see pictures and videos.
Technical SEO | | khi50 -
Two Domains for the Same Page
We are creating a website for a client that will have hundreds of geographically driven landing pages. These pages will all have a similar domain structure. For example www.domain.com/georgia-atlanta-fastfood-121 We want the domain to be SEO friendly, however it also needs to be print friendly for a business card. (ex www.domain.com/121) The client has requested that we have two domains for each page. One for the Search Engines and then another shorter one for print/advertising purposes. If we do that will search engines the site for duplicate content? I really appreciate any recommendations. Thanks! Anna
Technical SEO | | TracSoft0 -
I know I'm missing pages with my page level 301 re-directs. What can I do?
I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?
I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy. However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words. I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Page rank 2 for home page, 3 for service pages
Hey guys, I have noticed with one of our new sites, the home page is showing page rank two, whereas 2 of the internal service pages are showing as 3. I have checked with both open site explorer and yahoo back links and there are by far more links to the home page. All quality and relevant directory submissions and blog comments. The site is only 4 months old, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the fact 2 of the lesser linked pages are showing higher PR? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0