How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
-
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
-
great code Josh...but , after i saved it on .htaccess , a "?" appeared on the link..
http://www.domain.com/?/example/file.html
Is this ok ? pls advice/
Thank you,
-
You touched on a good point here "We set up our site to utilize a index redirect for all of our sub directories as well, so with this method you simply name your sub directories to match the url path that you desire. Each sub directory has it's own index which you redirect with a variation of the above code. By doing this you can have nice clean url paths like http://www.semclix.com/design/ecommerce/ - and mitigate the duplicate content issue. We hope that this helps."
Too often I see sites where they get the home page right but miss the re-write on the directories.
-
Here's the .htaccess rewrite command that you can use for the index.html redirect -
Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on
Index Rewrite RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.amarasoftware.com/ [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.amarasoftware.com/$1/ [R=301,L]
We set up our site to utilize a index redirect for all of our sub directories as well, so with this method you simply name your sub directories to match the url path that you desire. Each sub directory has it's own index which you redirect with a variation of the above code. By doing this you can have nice clean url paths like http://www.semclix.com/design/ecommerce/ - and mitigate the duplicate content issue. We hope that this helps.
-
I'd check it with some other software too... i.e. Raven Tools free trial or something, that will tell you if there's canonicalization problems... of course I'm not advocating Raven Tools over SEOmoz tools (I'm a member here and not there for good reasons), I just think best to try a few different tests before deciding if it's a problem. There might just be an issue with the SEOmoz campaign tool for the moment, which I'm sure they'll fix as soon as they realise.
Hey, aren't you the tutor I had in my SEC usability course?
-
Unfortunately I can't speak for how SEOmoz handles rewrites like this if it's already crawled the page.
The rewrite rule you're using looks like it's only rewriting the www portion of the URL, not index.html. So alone it wouldn't do anything to solve dupe content issues. (someone please correct me if I'm misreading the rewrite rule)
Here's a link to what I used to write a redirect for index.html on another site.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/6375.htm
I think it is a fairly safe assumption to make that SEOmoz is smart enough to realize if you're got a redirect in there (providing that its working). I'd still recommend taking a look to see if Google has cached or indexed an index.html version, though.
Edit: my personal, highly technical, acid-test for an index.html redirect is just going there and manually entering the url with index.html on the end, rather than waiting for a recrawl to see if you're heading in the right direction.
-
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?amarasoftware.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteRule .? http://www.%1amarasoftware.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Is what I use. In Seomoz this leads to www.amarasoftware.com and index.html so 2 different URL's, both with different incoming links, and a different authority, which has an impact on my ranking if correct. in SEomoz this a returns a duplicate title and meta tags errors. If SEOmoz finds 2 pages instead of one I may assume that Google agrees with this.
-
As you did, I'd normally handle this with a 301 from index.html to the root domain. When you say that it's "not had an impact" do you mean that the SEOmoz dashboard continues to show an error after it re-crawls, or that the search engines are not picking up the redirect?
SEOmoz dashboard does a great job, but I'd check to see how the search engines are actually indexing yourdomain.com/index.html vs. yourdomain.com also. If the search engines are indexing it as you want them to, then I'd be inclined to ignore the dashboard error.
I apologize if this is a stupid question, but I assume you manually checked that the redirect worked?
-
You wish to canonicalize the pages. That is the SEO word which describes exactly what you are trying to achieve.
Above are 5 URLs which can possibly lead to the exact same page. If you add the following HTML in the code then the pages will be canonicalized.
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 can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical? Any help would be great!! http://www.southernwhitewater.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
On Page Content. has a H2 Tag but should I also use H3 tags for the sub headings within this body of content
Hi Mozzers, My on page content comes under my H2 tag. I have a few subheadings within my content to help break it up etc and currently this is just underlined (not bold or anything) and I am wondering from an SEO perspective, should I be making these sub headings H3 tags. Otherwise , I just have 500-750 words of content under an H2 tag which is what I am currently doing on my landing pages. thanks pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0 -
SEOMoz mistaking image pages as duplicate content
I'm getting duplicate content errors, but it's for pages with high-res images on them. Each page has a different, high-res image on it. But SEOMoz keeps telling me it's duplicate content, even though the images are different (and named different). Is this something I can ignore or will Google see it the same way too?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHT0