Canonicalization on my website

[FCAbroad]

I am kind of new to all this but I would like to understand canonicalization. I have a website which when you arrive on it is www.mysite.com but once inside and flicking back to the homepage it reverts to www.mysite.com/index.html.

Should I be doing something re canonicalization? If so what?

Will the link juice be diluted by having two home page versions?

Thanks

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Caroline,

In this instance, you need to 301 redirect the /index.html version back to the .com version. That would be best practise.

[Johnny4B]

You need to edit your .htaccess,

<code>RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s(.*)/index\.php (or whatever extension you use) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [R=301,L]</code>

[FCAbroad]

Thanks for your prompt responses.

Is the link juice being diluted by having this structure?

[KarlBantleman]

It will be yeah and you will have duplicate content and titles issues as well so you need to fix it ASAP.

[FCAbroad]

Many thanks.

[jesse-landry]

These guys are all right, but John is assuming you're on an Apache server. You very well might be, but you will need to determine if it's LINUX or WINDOWS based that your site is hosted on.

Also, in addition to redirects I would go ahead and remove whatever internal links point to "www.yoursite.com/index.html" and change them to "www.yoursite.com" instead. The redirect will solve the problem ultimately, but fixing these links will help ever-so-slightly and especially in the meantime while you wait to fix your server level redirect.

Good luck!