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
-
Why are my Duplicated Pages not being updated?
I've recently changed a bunch of duplicated pages from our site. I did get a slightly minimized amount of duplicated pages, however, some of the pages that I've already fixed are still unfixed according to MOZ. Whenever I check the back-end of each of these pages, I see that they've already been changed and non of them are the same in terms of Meta Tag Title is concern. Can anyone provide any suggestions on what I should do to get a more accurate result? Is there a process that I'm missing?
Technical SEO | | ckroaster0 -
Should i put a full article on my home page to get google to visit more
Hi, our site is www.in2town.co.uk and i am thinking of putting an article on my home page in the middle under where it says lifestyle news, and getting rid of the middle column and instead have the latest news there to try and get google to visit more. I would like to know if you think this would look messy and not user friendly and if you think if i did do it would it get google to visit the site more often. all day we are always adding articles but on the home page it only shows a few lines of the article so i am concerned that these few lines are not getting google interested in visiting our site more often. we were on page one with our site but now since the upgrade we are on page eight so we are trying to combat this The article would change each time we put a new article on the site. so the article could be on there for ten mins before a new one is there any thoughts on this would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Too Many Page Links
I have 8 niche websites for golf clubs. This was done to carve out tight niches for specific types of clubs then only broadens each club by type - i.e. better player, game improvement, max game improvement. So far, for fairly young sites, <1 year, they are doing fairly well as I build content. Running campaigns has alerted me to one problem - too many on-page links. And because I use Wordpress those links are on each page in the right sidebar and lead to the other sites. Even though visitors arrive via organic search in most cases they tend to eventually exit to one of the other sites or they click on a product (Ebay) and venture off to hopefully make a purchase. Ex: Drivers site will have a picture link for each of the other 7 sites. Question: If I have one stie (like a splash page) used as one link to that page listing all the sites with a brief explanation of each site will this cause visitors to bounce off because they will have one click, than the list and other clicks depending on what other club/site they would like to go to. The links all open in new windows. This would cut down on the number of links per page of each site but will it cause too much work for visitors and cause them to leave?
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Crawl Results
How fresh is SEOMOZ crawl results ?. On my report for today I can see that my website ranking for several keywords run manually and individually on Google, Yahoo and bing to be better than the actual SEOMOZ report. Also have been noticing that Back link count on SEOMOZ report to be significantly less than counted with other sites and software.Can someone advise me on this ?
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Duplicate Page Title Crawl Error Issue
In the last crawl for on of our client websites the duplicate page title and page content numbers were very high. They are reading every page twice. http://www.barefootparadisevacations.com and http://barefootparadisevacations.com are being read as two different pages with the same page title. After the last crawl I used our built in redirect tool to redirect the urls, but the most recent crawl showed the same issue. Is this issue really hurting our rankings and if so, any suggestions on a fix for the problem? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | LoveMyPugs0 -
Noindex Pages indexed
I'm having problem that gogole is index my search results pages even though i have added the "noindex" metatag. Is the best thing to block the robot from crawling that file using robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | Tedred0 -
Page crawling is only seeing a portion of the pages. Any Advice?
last couple of page crawls have returned 14 out of 35 pages. Is there any suggestions I can take.
Technical SEO | | cubetech0 -
What Are The Page Linking Options?
Okay, so I'm working with a site that has pretty good domain authority, but the interior pages are not well linked or optimized. So, it ranks for some terms, but everything goes to the home page. So, I'd like to increase the authority of the interior pages. The client is not wild about spreading targeted juice via something like a footer. They also don't like a "Popular Searches" style link list. The objection is that it's not attractive. They currently use cute euphemisms as the linking text, so like "cool stuff" instead of "sheepskin seat covers." In that made up example, they'd like to rank for the latter, but insist on using the former. What about a slide show with alt text/links? Would that increase the authority of those pages in a term-targeted kinda way? Are there other options? Does it matter how prominent those links are, like footers not as good as something higher up the page? They currently use a pull-down kind of thing that still results in some pages having no authority. Do bots use that equally well? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 945010