How do I stop www.mysite.com/ showing as a duplicate of www.mysite.com

[ske11]

I have run the campaigns software over a site and it is showing that www.mysite.com/ is a duplicate of www.mysite.com, how do I correct this?

Is it a genuine duplicate page?

My first thought was to use rel canonical but there is no page called / to put it on.

Your suggestions welcomed

Sean

[ZacharyRussell]

You should put the rel=canonical tag on the index page of your site. It could either be the index.html (or any extension), or if it is a cms, whatever home page you specify from within it. The rel=canonical tag will specify any of the pages to register as the mysite.com (or mysite.com/) if you specify it. This should solve your duplicate content issue.

[bronxpad]

What about using a 301 Redirect? Would that help as well? If so is the PHP version a good option if you don't have access to the htaccess?

[ZacharyRussell]

You could use a 301 redirect in theory, BUT the purpose of using a 301 redirect is when a page has moved. When you are talking about mysite.com and mysite.com/ there is no two different pages, they are just different versions of the same link, just like mysite.com/index.html is the same page, when put the rel=canonical tag, you specify that these are all the same page, and the preferred version of that link.

[Dr-Pete]

It's not usually a big issue these days, but I'd agree with Zach that the canonical is probably your best bet. Since it's all one page, you just have to put the canonical on either version - they both resolve to the same place. To Google, any URL variation is a new "page", but there's just one page of HTML/code on your site.

Make sure your internal links are consistent. The most common problem is when you're linking to both versions. It's not a disaster, but it can send mixed signals to crawlers (including Google's and ours').