Is it a problem to have a homepage with a slug / URL ?

[edantadis]

Hi,

We are designing a web site for one of our clients, and using a home made CMS.

I don't know how this CMS has been built, but anyways, in the end the homepage has a URL format which looks like this : www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html. No www.mydomain.com.

Is it dangerous for SEO to have a slug/URL directly on the homepage ? Do you have experiences, cases where it has impacted a site negatively ?

The main problem I expect is duplicate content (with Google seeing both www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html as being different pages) but apparently the CMS is doing a 302 redirect from the root domain to the URL (I told my colleague it should at least be a 301).

Sorry if this question seems like basic SEO knowledge, but I really can't find a definitive answer on the subject.

Thank you very much

[CleverPhD]

Yes this is a big problem.  You are showing Google, 2 pages with the same content.  This would be the case if this were any two pages with the same content on your site.

You definitely need to setup a 301 redirect (and not a 302) the slug to the main page.

You have to be careful with CMS systems. They may be generating a ton of duplicate pages and you are not even aware of it.  Check with you IT person, but then look in Google Webmaster Tools and also use other tools to check (e.g spidering tools).

You want each URL on your site to have a unique title tag, description and page content on your site.

Good luck!

[NakulGoyal]

Is it possible for the CMS to include the canonical tags ? I would suggest you look into it and have www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html contain the canonical tag to www.mydomain.com which should also take care of this issue for the homepage. That way Google will deindex www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html and only index www.mydomain.com