Duplicate Page Titles

[pixel83]

I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file.  The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates:

www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com

www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html

www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/

I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical".

So i placed the the following in my index.html:

I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content.  Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal.  Please view the attached image.

i9G89.png

[Vahe.Arabian]

Hi Erik, If there is a good intent (which there is), this is normal. It's similar when SEOmoz will record the number of 301's, you are looking to see whether or not what you have implemented has actually been noticed. In general for your scenario I would have done a 301 redirect, using the htaccess file to strengthen the domain authority. In addition, Erik check out Google Webmaster Tools to ensure any other duplicate page titles are not appearing for the site. Hope this helps, Vahe

[KeriMorgret]

I also would have fixed this with a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. In addition, you have calusacrossinganimalhospital.com and www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com that resolve independently, so you likely have at least six URLs for your home page.

Let us know if you'd like a hand finding the right rewrite code, or if your website developer is OK with just taking this instruction and fixing things for you.

[pixel83]

Thanks everyone, a link to a rewrite code for 301 would be great.

[Daylan]

Give this one a try Erik.

http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

Be sure to assign in your webmaster tools if you are using either www. or no www too. (site config - settings). Choose one of the options to ensure you don't get both types showing up in your SERPs.

Good luck

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Erik,

Everyone here has given you good advice, so let me just add my 2 cents.

301's using htaccess can be tricky, so if you get in over your head don't worry too much about it - the canonical tag should do the trick. Every time you use a canonical on your site, you'll see a notice in your crawl diagnostics dashboard. This is just a "notice", not a warning or an error. We just want you to know our spiders found a canonical in case you didn't intend to be there.

Best of luck with your SEO!