Why am I getting all these duplicate pages?

[W2GITeam]

This is going for basically all my pages, but my website has 3 'duplicates' as the rest just have 2 (no index)

Why are these 3 variations counting as duplicate pages?

http://www.homepage.com

http://homepage.com

http://www.hompage.com/index.php

[Ray-pp]

Hello W2GITeam and welcome to the world of SEO!

The problem you've described is covered in basic/fundamental SEO concepts. The specific topic to help you turn those 3 pages into a single, non-duplicate, indexed page is through Canonical tags.

Learn more about those tags and how they help suppress duplicate content from being indexed here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

That's plenty to get you started

[Innovation-Group_SEO]

Technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url,  pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Check this link: http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

[HashtagHustler]

This post is deleted!

[Travis_Bailey]

Your next question is; "Great, but how do I fix it?"

It looks like this particular detail was missed during server configuration. You would handle this with rewrites via .htaccess if you're using an Apache server. However, if you're unfamiliar with the file - proceed with caution - if you can't push and pull from a test environment for some reason. A little bit of white space or a syntax error can knock the site down until you find the error.

Otherwise, Ultimate Htaccess has just about everything you need to know. Here are the commands you will need. If you're using WordPress, make sure the redirects go before the section of your file that pertains to WordPress.

[ThompsonPaul]

Actually, canonical tags are the absolute last-ditch way of dealing with this issue.

The correct solution is to use 301-redirects to force all version of the URL except the primary to redirect to the primary (also called canonical) URL. Canonical in this instance just means the primary or most authoritative version of something. Nothing to do with the tags of the same name.

The only reason to use the rel=canonical tag for this is if you have absolutely no way to do it through 301-redirects. (For instance your host doesn't allow access to the .htaccess file and your DNS system doesn't allow it either.)

Use Travis's info below for exactly how to do this in .htaccess. There are also many other posts here in Q&A that address this if you want more reference points.

Paul