Duplicate Content aka 301 redirect from .com to .com/index.html

[omakad]

Moz reports are telling me that I have duplicate content on the home page because .com and .com/index.html are being seen as two pages. I have implemented 301 redirect  using various codes I found online, but nothing seems to work. Currently I'm using this code.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^jacksonvilleacservice.com
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ [L,R=301]

Nothing is changing. What am I doing wrong? I have given it several weeks but report stays the same.  Also according to webmasters tools they can't see this as duplicate content. What am I doing wrong?

[GlobeRunner]

Since index.html is most likely your home page (it's the default home page on your web server), then you really don't need to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect in this situation. The only thing you need to do is make sure that on your website you don't have any links pointing to www.yourdomain.com/index.html. Rather, all of those links should be pointing to www.yourdomain.com as the home page.

If you set up a redirect from index.html to your site's home page www.domain.com then you'll probably create a "loop" that won't work. If you find all the links to /index.html and fix those then that will be enough to take care of this.

[zipline]

I agree with Eric it would be a good idea to link to your root domain and not the specific file. You can just link to yourdomain.com or build your links to your homepage using code similar to the following: Home.

I have also seen instances where yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are treated as separate pages and cause similar problems. It appears you are using www.yourdomain.com so while you are messing with 301 redirects you might want to add one from yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com for all URLs in case a link is made to yourdomain.com.

[john4math]

A 301 redirect for this can be tricky, as the other responses have said in this thread, it can create an infinite redirect loop.  I'm pretty sure it can be done, but I don't have enough technical know-how to tell you what's wrong with your conf code there.

A simple way around this is to put a rel=canonical tag in the of your home page, pointing at your root directory (i.e. "/").  You can include this in the in the file, so it'll show up when the page is accessed under both / and for /index.html.  The HTML for this would look like: .  Make sure your internal links point to the canonical version, as this method may lose you a little pagerank (pagerank coming from /index.html to /).

You have a canonicalization problem for your subdomain too... meaning you're serving the same content for both http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com (with www) and http://jacksonvilleacservice.com (without www).  I'd pick one, and then do 301 redirects from one to the other, rather than solving that issue with canonical tags.

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, first thing let’s not reply on report only and check some online 301 redirection checker to see if your redirection code is working or not! Here is a tool by SEObook that allows you to check the header status of any URL http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

Redirection code is very much depends upon what website are you using like PHP, wordpress, ASP or anything else the redirection code will be different as PHP and ASP are different languages and for WP there are tons of plugins that can do your work!

My advice would be to search for “how to redirect (website’s language)” and I am sure there will be some articles that have explained the step by step process. Hope this helps!

Hope this helps!

[DougRoberts]

My preference tends to be to redirect such pages to the domain rather than the other way round. You'll find that people naturally link to the domain (without the path) so making that the canonical version makes sense. It also means that you can future-proof your site somewhat. (What happens when your change the content management system and instead of an index.html for your home page, you've not got an index.php page...)

So, my recommendation would be to make sure that all internal links to the home page on your own site point to http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ and set up a redirect from the index.html to the domain.

Then you'd use something like the following to redirect the index.html to the main page:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Another tool to check your headers and that your redirects are in place is: http://web-sniffer.net/

It also appears that you've got a problem with both the www and non-www versions of the page responsing with a 200 response code.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you look at your inbound links using Open Site Explorer, you'll see that you've got a mix of links pointing to either http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ or http://jacksonvilleacservice.com/.

(There don't appear to be any external links show in OSE linking to your /index.html page)

[KristinaKledzik]

All of the answers here have pretty much outlined what you should do in this situation, but I thought I'd sum it all up here:

• You probably don't need to redirect /index.html to www.jacksonvilleacservice.com of the website for the homepage, since it can be tricky. Instead, make sure that:

• All internal links pointing to the homepage go to ttp://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com rather than the /index.html page

• The homepage canonicals to the www.jacksonvilleacservice.com with_out_ the /index.html

• If you want to be doubly sure, you can use the code Doug provided.

• Other commenters have also noticed, a potentially bigger issue is that you're creating two copies of your site by allowing visitors to reach your site with or without a "www" before the URL. For that you will need to create a 301 redirect, and you should canonical to be doubly sure.

Good luck!

[omakad]

Thank you very much. I have implemented your suggestions and we'll see how it goes. Thanks again.