Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title

[TOMMarketingLtd.]

I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it).  He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other.  Any suggestions?

The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls:

Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village

http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm

Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village

http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/

Your help is greatly appreciated!

Sheryl

[UnderRugSwept]

Do you have access to the root directory to set up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file?

[TOMMarketingLtd.]

No, I just send an email to the account manager at register.com telling him to do things exactly as I say.  It is very time consuming, but this is the way the business owner wants it done for now.

[Unity]

It's really important that you add a permanent 301 redirect from http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm pointing to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com (as mentioned by Marisa). Otherwise SEO goodness can be split between the two domains making it harder for you to get the sites ranking.

At the moment the homepage is accessible via 4 URL versions:

http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm

ALSO, when you send the request you should also be requesting that a 301 redirect is also placed on the non-www URL version pointing to its respective www URL version - you'd want to have this done for every page e.g. http://cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel should redirect to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel

Note - I often have the same discussion with web developers, from their point of view it is the same page and I understand that but you just need to state that Google treats it as multiple versions (do some research are canonicalization).

[JaspalX]

A relatively painless way (if .htaccess is too hard for your contact to implement) is to use rel canonical to point to the url you want since Google and Bing will (eventually) notice your canonical tag.

So, for http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm you could add a tag like the one below into your index.htm file in the head section:

You should also make sure that any links to the home page refer to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com rather than http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm

See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394 for more info on rel canonical

Having said that, a 301 redirect is probably the best way to solve the problem.

BTW, I'm assuming it is an Apache server and so uses .htaccess - IIS can be a bit more tricky (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis#chaining for IIS redirects)

You could use something like this in the .htaccess file (always make a backup copy of the .htaccess file before saving it in case something goes wrong - typos etc.):

BACKUP EXISTING .htaccess FIRST!!!

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

may need to uncomment the next line depending on host

#Options +FollowSymlinks

add www for non www pages - you may not need these two lines

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^cascadevillagehotel.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The following redirect is the one for index.htm assumes the default page is /

redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/

[TOMMarketingLtd.]

Totally helpful, thank you!