Duplicated Content with Index.php

[BrandonEML]

Good Afternoon,

My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage.

I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.

[ecommercebc]

Hi there,

The good news is that this issue is very common for Joomla installations! Have you checked out the following guides?:

Duplicate Pages in Joomla: Causes, Most Common Errors, Solutions

Avoid Duplicate URLS - Joomla SEO

Joomla and Duplicate Content: Fixing htaccess