Duplicate content issue in SEOmoz campaign.

[gerardoH]

Hi,

We are running  a campaign for a website in SEOmoz.

We get a dup content issue warning:

http://www.oursite.com and http://www.oursite.com/ are being seen as 2 different urls.

Only difference among 2 urls is the trailing slash at the end of the second url.

Why is this happening? I was aware of www vs non www but never heard of an issue related to the slash.

Thanks for your help!

[Yanbo]

From search engine perspective http://www.oursite.com and http://www.oursite.com/ are not the same thing.

This problem however is easily fixed, If you are using apache it's a matter of simple config file modification.

You can refer to http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-i-prevent-duplicate-content-between-www-page-com-and-www-page-com for more information.

Kind regards

Bojan

[gerardoH]

So, this code:

#removes trailing slash
         RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
         RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
         RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.localhost$ [NC]
         RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L]

and this code:

REDIRECT to canonical url

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

should be added to our .htaccess ?

Or is it just one of the two code blocks?

Thanks for your time!

[Yanbo]

#removes trailing slash
         RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
         RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
         RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.localhost$ [NC]
         RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L]

Above code segment removes trailing slashes, second code block is doing redirection from non-www to www.

In order for above code to work you will need to add two lines above it, telling Apache to enable rewrite module.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

So with that combined here is how your .htaccess file should look like

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

#removes trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.localhost$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L]

If you are using non-Apache server such as IIS let me know and I send you configuration for it.

Kind regards

Bojan

[JHSpecialty]

Nice to know this.  I have had the same issue arise out of nowehre about week maybe two back.  It took awhile but I found the same htaccess quick fix but it seems as if it was an seomoz alogorithim change up.  Robot Roger works his butt off in the basment or so seomoz tells me he  must have found some free time to switch up the campaign errors alogorithim.