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

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi James,

First, run a crawl on your site. Is the /index.html getting picked up in the crawl? If so then it is being linked to internally. Check the navigation bar(s) to see if the link to 'Home' is linking to /index.html. Once you have found all the internal links linking to /index.html, you will then need to change these to point to the home page without the filepath (e.g. http://www.example.com/).

The second step would be to implement a canonical tag on both pages that point to the home page without the filepath. So in your example that would be as follows:

That is one way of solving any duplicate content issues without using 301 redirects via .htaccess. However, I believe there is a way to do this via .asp but you would have to search around for this. I did a quick search and found this page that might be of help.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

[ThompsonPaul]

Adam, unfortunately the method you link to won't work, because the two URLs in question here are actually the same page. If this were handled this way, you'd be creating an infinite redirect looping in on itself.

Paul

[Creatomatic]

That's correct - they are the same page.

To better explain, this is all done old-school via FTP, so any edits or changes I make to the file/page "index.html" apply to the following URL's

www.home.com

www.home.com/index.html

Is there any harm in telling search engines that the Canonical version of a page IS the same page?

(Actually, there were LOADS more but I've got fixes in place for most of these)

[ThompsonPaul]

In this situation, using a canonical to point to the primary is a workaround, but the correct way to handle it is with a 301 redirect. Canonicals are to be used when both versions of the page need to be indexed, but all the influence is to be directed to a single URL.

In this case, there is no functional reason why you would want both URLs to remain in the index and be reachable by the two different addresses because they are the exact same page. Therefore the correct solution is to 301 redirect the /index.html URL to the primary URL. (This will also be cleanest to maintain, will pass maximum amount of authority, and is best for usability)

ASP sites are hosted on Microsoft IIS servers. IIS does not use or recognize .htaccess files. Instead, you will need to use the URL Rewrite Module. It should be preinstalled on most IIS servers, or you can request that your host/server admin add it. (If the server's older than IIS 7, you'll need a 3rd part ISAPI Rewrite module instead of Microsoft's own module)

Here's a TechRepublic article on using the Rewrite Module to perform the same sorts of functions as .htaccess on Apache servers. http://ow.ly/fXSAB In many ways, its basics are easier than .htaccess.

Note you should also be redirecting the non-www version of the site to the fully qualified domain name as well if you haven't already

Hope this helps?

Paul

[Creatomatic]

It certainly does help, many thanks Paul - hugely appreciated.