How best to deal with www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html

[Creatomatic]

Firstly, this is for an .asp site - and all my usual ways of fixing this (e.g. via htaccess) don't seem to work.

I'm working on a site which has www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html - both URL's resolve to the same page/content.

If I simply drop a rel canonical into the page, will this solve my dupe content woes?

The canonical tag would then appear in both www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html cases.

If the above is Ok, which version should I be going with?

- or -

Thanks in advance folks,
James @ Creatomatic

[Keszi]

Hi James,

If you will have the  on both of the pages it should do the trick.

Or another possible solution would be to create a 301 redirect for www.home.com/index.html -> www.home.com/

Beware if you use both redirect and canonical have the same link there.

I have seen infinite loops created with canonical and 301 created for search engines. Canonical was pointing to the "/" version and the redirect was with the non - "/".

I hope this helps.

greetings,

Istvan

[Creatomatic]

Many thanks Istvan - I'll give that a try.

[donford]

Or another possible solution would be to create a 301 redirect for

www.home.com/index.html -> www.home.com/

Would be the preferred method, if not available then use the Canonical option.

Here is a great SEOMoz blog post

Here is a quote pertaining to your issue:

"Multiple Versions of the Homepage

This is another common mistake.  Potentially a homepage URL could be access through the following means, depending on how it has been built -

http://seomoz.org
http://www.seomoz.org/home.html
http://www.seomoz.org/index.html

If the homepage can be accessed via these type of URLs, they should 301 to the correct URL which in this case would be www.seomoz.org.

Quick caveat - the only exception would be if these multiple versions of the homepage served a unique purpose, such as being shown to users who are logged in or have cookies dropped.  In this case, you'd be better to use rel=canonical instead of a 301."

Hope it helps.