Duplicate Home Page content and title ... Fix with a 301?

[peruviansoul]

Hello everybody,

I have the following erros after my first crawl:

Duplicate Page Content

http://www.peruviansoul.com

http://www.peruviansoul.com/

http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2

Duplicate Page title

http://www.peruviansoul.com

http://www.peruviansoul.com/

http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2

Do you think I could fix them redirecting to http://www.peruviansoul.com with a couple of 301 in the .htaccess file?

Thank you all for you help.

Gustavo

[BailHotline]

Hey Gustavo,

Yes you can, here is the code needed for the .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^peruviansoul.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.peruviansoul.com$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index.(html?|php[45]?|[aj]spx?)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index.(html?|php[45]?|[aj]spx?)$ http://www.peruviansoul.com%1 [R=301,L]

Let me know if this works for you.

[mediabase]

Hi Gustavo, First of all I  want to tell you about the duplicate content. Duplicate content always hurt your website ranking & which overall decreases the website visibility.This duplicate content is easily recognized by google which results in removing the webpages from indexing.The first thing you need to do is to identifying the duplicate content on your website & If you find the duplicate content then it should be fixed by using several fixing techniques for duplicate content that was mentioned in the below :

Fixing the the duplicate content

I think that above link helps you to solves the problem of duplicate content.

[peruviansoul]

Thank you for your reply.

I will try that code out, but would you be so kind to let me know where I can find a quick explanation of that code?

And if it's possible, I would also like to know why is this piece of code better than a simple 301 redirect.

Thanks again!

[peruviansoul]

Thank you for the link

Will check it out right away!

[coremediadesign]

If the 'id' parameter serves different page content then perhaps you could have a look at mod_rewrite and create a class, which converts dynamic urls to the static looking ones.

If the parameter only affects a small portion of the content then I would use canonical url to inform crawlers that the current page is actually the 'index' regardless of the parameter:

Regardless of what you are planning on doing, you should make sure that all links on your site, which link to the home page have just the slash in the href attribute - like so:

Home page

This way all of the links to the home page that crawlers will see are going to point to one location only.

[Dr-Pete]

Just a side note - your home-page TITLE is "Peruvian Soul | Peruvian Soul" - not that it's likely to look spammy to Google, but it just looks odd and isn't really helping anything. Might be an artifact of your CMS.