Indexed non existent pages, problem appeared after we 301d the url/index to the url.

[Bryan_Loconto]

I recently read that if a site has 2 pages that are live such as:

http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/  will come up as duplicate if they are both live...

I read that it's best to 301 redirect the http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. I read that this helps avoid duplicate content and keep all the link juice on one page.

We did the 301 for one of our clients and we got about 20,000 errors that did not exist.  The errors are of pages that are indexed but do not exist on the server.

We are assuming that these indexed (nonexistent) pages are somehow linked to the http://www.url.com/index

The links are showing 200 OK.

We took off the 301 redirect from the http://www.url.com/index page however now we still have 2 exaact pages, www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/.

What is the best way to solve this issue?

[SEO5Team]

Bryan, you might have created an infinite loop that might be causing the issue you are describing. More on the issue HERE

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi I am afraid this is not the issue. It is not an endless loop, usually an endless loop will not let the site load, it keeps redirecting and you can never land on a page... This is not the case. But thank you for your efforts you get a +1

[ThompsonPaul]

What are some examples of the "non-existent" URLs that are getting indexed, Bryan?

It's going to be pretty hard to diagnose this without actually seeing the site.

Paul