Duplicate Title

[tammyc]

Hi,

I am getting a "duplicate title" error for all the sites I make and I am not sure why - it's only for my homepage.

www.carolynnescottages.com.au is one for example.

It picks up the url www.carolynnescottages.com.au and also www.carolynnescottages.com.au/index  The index page is the homepage.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also is there some tutorials where I can learn how to use each of the tools in seomoz properly?  videos?

Thanks again.

Tammy

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Tammy,

What you are experiencing is a fairly common issue. You have effectively 2 versions of your homepage; one with and one without the /index extension. Thereby creating a duplicate content issue.

You can solve this issue by implementing a 301 redirect from the /index version to the non-/index version. After implementing this redirect you will then need to update the internal linking to change any links still pointing to the old /index version. For example, if you look at your homepage at http://www.carolynnescottages.com.au/, you will notice that the links to 'Home' in the top navigation and the footer, all point to http://www.carolynnescottages.com.au/index. You will need to change these links.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

[theLotter]

In addition to Crimsons answer, you can also put a canonical tag on the preferred version of your homepage so that users will see both pages without being redirected but Google will understand that only one should be indexed.

[tammyc]

Thank you Adam and Contributor for your prompt replies.  I think I worked out the problem.  I hadsetup  2 domains www.carolynnescottages.com.au and also carolynnescottages.com.au.  So I deleted the second one.

Thanks again.

Cheers,

Tammy

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Tammy,

You have not solved the problem and this was not the root of the problem in the first place.

You will now need to setup a 301 redirect from the non-www version (http://carolynnescottages.com.au) to the www version (http://www.carolynnescottages.com.au) as well as implement my previous recommendations. On further inspection, after doing a site: search of your site, there are both non-www and www pages indexed. You may also need to set your preferred domain in Google webmaster tools as well.

'Deleting' the carolynnescottages.com.au, as you put it (although you actually haven't deleted this as such), will not resolve the duplicate content issues you had previously.

[tammyc]

Hi Adam,

I really appreciate your patience with me.  I have done as you have suggested and added the canonical tag to my pages and fixed the links, and told Google which is my preferred url.  I think I have setup the 301 redirect - how will I know if it has worked?  How long will it take?

Thanks again for your help.

Cheers,

Tammy