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
-
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
How Google sees my page
When looking for crawlability issues, what is the difference between using webmaster tools Fetch as google, looking at the cached pages in google index site:mypage.com, or using spider simulator tools.
Technical SEO | | shashivzw0 -
Home page not indexed by any search engines
We are currently having an issue with our homepage not being indexed by any search engines. We recently transferred our domain to Godaddy and there was an issue with the DNS. When we typed our url into Google like this "https://www.mysite.com" nothing from the site came up in the search results, only our social media profiles. When we typed our url into Google like this "mysite.com" we were sent to a GoDaddy parked page. We've been able to fix the issue over at Godaddy and the url "mysite.com" is not being redirected to "https://mysite.com" but, Google and the other search engines have yet to respond. I would say our fix has been in place for at least 72 hours. Do I need to give this more time? I would think that at lease one search engine would have picked up on the change by now and would start indexing the site properly.
Technical SEO | | bcglf1 -
Duplicate Page Title
Our pages has so many DUPLİCATE PAGE TİTLE
Technical SEO | | iskq
I want to change all of them, is it right way?0 -
Sitemap and crawl impact
If I have two links in the sitemap (for example: page1.html and page2.html) but the web-site contains more pages (page1.html, page2.html and page3.html) is this a sign for Google to not to crawl other pages? I.e. Will Google index page3.html? Consider that any page can be accessed.
Technical SEO | | ditoroin0 -
How to Delete a Page on the Web?
Google reports and I have confirmed that the following old page is presenting on the Web. http://www.audiobooksonline.com/The_Great_American_Baseball_Box_Greatest_Moments_from_the_Last_80_Years_original_audio_collection_compact_discs.html This page hasn't been in our site's directory for some time and is no longer needed by us. What is the best way to fix this Google reported crawl error?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
How best to deal with www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html
Firstly, this is for an .asp site - and all my usual ways of fixing this (e.g. via htaccess) don't seem to work. I'm working on a site which has www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html - both URL's resolve to the same page/content. If I simply drop a rel canonical into the page, will this solve my dupe content woes? The canonical tag would then appear in both www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html cases. If the above is Ok, which version should I be going with? - or - Thanks in advance folks,
Technical SEO | | Creatomatic
James @ Creatomatic0 -
No index directory pages?
All, I have a site built on WordPress with directory software (edirectory) on the backend that houses a directory of members. The Wordpress portion of the site is full of content and drives traffic through to the directory. Like most directories, the results pages are thin on content and mainly contain links to member profiles. Is it best to simply no index the search results for the directory portion of the site?
Technical SEO | | JSOC0