Linking to root domain or index page

[ArtiKalra]

While link building, should I link to index page of my website i.e www.mydomainname.com/index.html or should I link to root domain i.e www.mydomainname,com

Also I see duplicate title error for index page and root domain in error statistic. How can I get rid of this.

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

Hi Arti,

You'll just need to create a 301 redirect from www.yoursite.com/index.html to www. yoursite.com. This will permanently eliminate the /index.html version (which is a duplicate page) and fix the duplicate content error.

After that, build links to www.yoursite.com.

Hope this help. If you need more info on how to do the 301 redirect just let me know.

[Guan]

If you have wordpress you can add

<code>php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: ".get_bloginfo('url'));  exit();  ?></code>

<code>to your 404 page.</code>

[ArtiKalra]

Hi Anthony, Thanks for your reply. Does that mean that I should actually remove index.html from my website. Also please help me for 301 redirect. Rgds Arti

[BedeFahey]

To me, that's not what your 404 page is for. I wouldn't recommend doing it. What happens if they typo something, or hit a bad link some other way? There's no message to tell them what happened and it creates a confusing user experience.

Better, in my opinion, to redirect the file individually

Arti, there's a good article on SEOmoz about redirects. Down the bottom, there are some how-to guides on how to do things like 301's. Just be careful of infinite loops if you're using apache.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Arti,

Generally, you want to link to your root domain. Many common website templates link to home as /index.html, but that really hasn't been necessary for years.

The easiest way to fix this would be to add a canonical tag in your homepage, which is the /index.html file. It would go in the section and look like this:

After you add this, when you look at your source code for your homepage, you should see this tag in there from whatever address you reached the page from.

There's a lot of information on duplicate content out there, and a lot of different ways to fix the same problem. Here's a good overview of the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Best of luck with your SEO.