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,
James @ Creatomatic -
It certainly does help, many thanks Paul - hugely appreciated.
-
In this situation, using a canonical to point to the primary is a workaround, but the correct way to handle it is with a 301 redirect. Canonicals are to be used when both versions of the page need to be indexed, but all the influence is to be directed to a single URL.
In this case, there is no functional reason why you would want both URLs to remain in the index and be reachable by the two different addresses because they are the exact same page. Therefore the correct solution is to 301 redirect the /index.html URL to the primary URL. (This will also be cleanest to maintain, will pass maximum amount of authority, and is best for usability)
ASP sites are hosted on Microsoft IIS servers. IIS does not use or recognize .htaccess files. Instead, you will need to use the URL Rewrite Module. It should be preinstalled on most IIS servers, or you can request that your host/server admin add it. (If the server's older than IIS 7, you'll need a 3rd part ISAPI Rewrite module instead of Microsoft's own module)
Here's a TechRepublic article on using the Rewrite Module to perform the same sorts of functions as .htaccess on Apache servers. http://ow.ly/fXSAB In many ways, its basics are easier than .htaccess.
Note you should also be redirecting the non-www version of the site to the fully qualified domain name as well if you haven't already
Hope this helps?
Paul
-
That's correct - they are the same page.
To better explain, this is all done old-school via FTP, so any edits or changes I make to the file/page "index.html" apply to the following URL's
Is there any harm in telling search engines that the Canonical version of a page IS the same page?
(Actually, there were LOADS more but I've got fixes in place for most of these)
-
Adam, unfortunately the method you link to won't work, because the two URLs in question here are actually the same page. If this were handled this way, you'd be creating an infinite redirect looping in on itself.
Paul
-
Hi James,
First, run a crawl on your site. Is the /index.html getting picked up in the crawl? If so then it is being linked to internally. Check the navigation bar(s) to see if the link to 'Home' is linking to /index.html. Once you have found all the internal links linking to /index.html, you will then need to change these to point to the home page without the filepath (e.g. http://www.example.com/).
The second step would be to implement a canonical tag on both pages that point to the home page without the filepath. So in your example that would be as follows:
That is one way of solving any duplicate content issues without using 301 redirects via .htaccess. However, I believe there is a way to do this via .asp but you would have to search around for this. I did a quick search and found this page that might be of help.
Hope that helps,
Adam.
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
-
Purpose of static index.html pages?
Hi All, I am fairly new to the technical side of SEO and was hoping y'all could help me better understand the purpose of dynamic rendering with index.html pages and any implications they might hold for SEO. I work to support an eComm site that includes a subdomain for its product pages: products.examplesite.com. I recently learned from one of our developers that there are actually two sets of product pages - a set of pages that he terms "reactive," that are present on our site, that only display content when a user clicks through to them and are not retrievable by search engines. And then a second set of static pages that were created just for search engines and end in .index.html. So, for example: https://products.examplesite.com/product-1/ AND https://products.examplesite.com/product-1/index.html I am confused as to what specifically the index.html pages are doing to support indexation, as they do not show up in Google Site searches, but the regular pages do. Is there something obvious I am missing here?
Technical SEO | | Lauren_Brick0 -
I have duplicate content but // are causing them
I have 3 pages duplicated just by a / Example: https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**//**
Technical SEO | | Renalynd
https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**/** What would cause this?? And how would I fix it? Thanks! Rena0 -
How to no index / no follow CAD files .dxf .dwg
Hi, I have a new Wordpress site with a number of CAD files (.dxf& .dwg) downloadable straight from the site. These have been flagged in MOZ as warnings with everying from No Title/Description to duplicate content. Does anybody now how I would no index these type of files? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Jon_Pearce0 -
Duplicate Home Page
Hi everyone! So, I;m using the crawl diagnostics in Moz and it's telling that I've got duplicate content for these two pages: http://www.bridgelanguages.com/
Technical SEO | | Bridge_Education_Group
http://www.bridgelanguages.com/index.php?p=3233&source=3 Would a redirect from the 2nd page to the 1st one be a solution? I'm not even sure where that 2nd link is on the site? Any suggestions or has anyone experienced the same? Thanks! Kelly0 -
Double Slash // in URL
My client is using double forward slahes in URL like this "//" is this affecting SEO?
Technical SEO | | yanaiguana1110 -
How do I resolve Twin domains? redirect website.com to www.website.com?
I am new to this website. Tried to run a campain and got a warning that website.com resolves to www.website.com which hinders SERP by competing for Keyword indexing!. (website is my domain name) Would appreciate help with this. Thanks. S.H. PS: here is the exact wording of error : We have detected that the domain www.yfvaccine.com and the domain yfvaccine.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here.
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Is this tabbed implementation of SEO copy correct (i.e. good for getting indexed and in an ok spot in the html as viewed by search bots?
We are trying to switch to a tabbed version of our team/product pages at SeatGeek.com, but where all tabs (only 2 right now) are viewed as one document by the search engines. I am pretty sure we have this working for the most part, but would love some quick feedback from you all as I have never worked with this approach before and these pages are some of our most important. Resources: http://www.ericpender.com/blog/tabs-and-seo http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=03fdefb488a16343&hl=en http://searchengineland.com/is-hiding-content-with-display-none-legitimate-seo-13643 Sample in use: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors **Old Version: ** http://screencast.com/t/BWn0OgZsXt http://seatgeek.com/boston-celtics-tickets/ New Version with tabs: http://screencast.com/t/VW6QzDaGt http://screencast.com/t/RPvYv8sT2 http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-tickets/ Notes: Content not displayed stacked on browser when Javascript turned off, but it is in the source code. Content shows up in Google cache of new page in the text version. In our implementation the JS is currently forcing the event to end before the default behavior of adding #about in this case to the url string - this can be changed, should it be? Related to this, the developer made it so that typing http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-tickets/#about directly into the browser does not go to the tab with copy, which I imagine could be considered spammy from a human review perspective (this wasn't intentional). This portion of the code is below the truncated view of the fetch as Googlebot, so we didn't have that resource. Are there any issues with hidden text / is this too far down in the html? Any/all feedback appreciated. I know our copy is old, we are in the process of updating it for this season.
Technical SEO | | chadburgess0 -
Page not being indexed
Hi all, On our site we have a lot of bookmaker reviews, and we are ranking pretty good for most bookmaker names as keywords, however a single bookmaker seems to have been shunned by Google. For a search "betsafe" in Denmark, this page does not appear among the top 50: http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe All of our other review pages rank in top 10-20 for the bookmaker name as keyword. What to do if Google has "banned" a page? Best regards, Rasmus
Technical SEO | | rasmusbang0