Canonical links

[SplashBacksNI]

My website is relatively new, January. We climbed steadily to 6th for our search term then overnight rocketed to 1st. This only lasted a week and have been stuck at 9th ever since.

When I use the SEO Moz tools our site should theoretically be top...I only joined today btw.

Anyway in Google webmaster tools I noticed it said I had duplicate title tags, when I checked to see what the pages were- it was my home page! Google also seems to have cached two versions of our homepage, the root domain and the Default.aspx page.

Now I have fixed this canonical linking issue today (using canonical link tag and 301s) so time will tell but has anyone got any first hand experience of this issue? Was it a big factor?

Thanks!

[AlanMosley]

It is a big factor, because your home page rank is split wetween the 2, what you want to do, is make sure you dont not have any links to the default.aspx version in your site, one would asume that you do for it to getinto the index.

[SplashBacksNI]

Yes I had a link to it on every page! None at all now, I'm not entirely sure how else you are supposed to link to your home page but I changed all my links to my root domain just to be sure.

Thanks Alan, I had my suspicions for a long time that it was a weird problem we were suffering from and it does look like that could be the case.

[AlanMosley]

yes just link to "/" or http://domainname.com