Web designer doesn't see duplicate pages or issues??? Help!

[MissThumann]

I have a website that has duplicate pages, and I want to fix them. I told my web guy and his response was:

"we do not see any issues on our end. It is not hurting any ranking in the 3 major searches. We have no duplicate pages"

Here's the site http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/ 

Here's the home page again http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php

Here's what MOZ say: Please see attached image.

I'm not sure what to tell him, as i'm not a web person, but MOZ is telling me we have issues on the site and I feel like they should be fixed??

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[LauraSultan]

Yes, this is a duplicate problem when it comes to SEO. This is an issue for two reasons:

1. Search engines see these as two different URLs even though they point to the same page. They probably understand that it's the same page but not necessarily. The correct way to handle this would be to 301-redirect http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/. (If your designer doesn't know how to do this, you need a new web designer.)

2. This is also a problem because any backlinks may be split between the two URLs even though they are the same page. This will be fixed by the 301-redirect as well.

[ThomasHarvey]

Your web developer is wrong. You do have multiple version of the homepage

You have the following:

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

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

http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

I would first of all get your web developer to do a http:// to http://www. redirect across your whole site, so whenever any user lands on your site they atleast get put onto the same version.

As for with/without index.php you are getting these duplicates, I would ask the web developer to remove any references to index.php and just refer specifically to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/ whilst also setting a canonical within the index.php to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

If your developer tries to fight this I would look for a new developer.

Just had a quick look through the site, your developer looks to be being lazy. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/I6khUBrH under serve scaled images, they haven't bothered to resize it and that's making your website load slower.

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/images/img0018.png is just a lazy way of naming images.

[MissThumann]

Thank you Laura, you've given me a clearer understanding of what I need to say to him. I do think I need a new guy though..

[MissThumann]

I'm now well armed to go back to him and ask again for him to make these changes.

Hopefully he'll listen to me this time! Though I'm now thinking I need a new guy...

Thanks Thomas!

[ThomasHarvey]

Best of luck, feel free to send me an email (or message on here) if you need me to go any further into detail.