Duplicate Page Content Issue

[kirupa]

Hello,

I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received  Duplicate Page Content for

http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19)

http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1)

Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?

[donnieath]

On the index.html page, in your section place a canonical tag pointing to http://yourappliancerepairla.com

like this:

[kirupa]

Is this better than updating my .htaccess file? Could you explain me please why the second one, with DA of 1 and that doesn't even exist (you cannot access it) is considered to be a duplicate?

http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19)

http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1)

Thank you!

[donnieath]

They are different ways of doing practically the same thing. In your .htaccess you would set up the /index.html to be 301 redirected to yourappliancerepairla.com. Which will redirect any user that lands on /index.html to yourappliancerepairla.com.

The canonical tag doesn't redirect the user to the homepage, but it tells google or any other search engine that the "original" content is yourappliancerepairla.com rather than /index.html or /home.html or www.yourappliancerepairla.com and so on.

I would give the edge to canonical tags, but 301 redirects in the .htaccess file do have their use.

Looking at your site (viewing the page source) your home nav link is pointing to /index.html you can change that to http://yourappliancerepairla.com or simply " / " that change might actually fix your issue... but I would still put a canonical tag in the header of index.html for defensive purposes. Also consider placing a canonical for all your pages as a defensive mechanism to duplicate content.

It's considered a duplicate because index.html does exist, index.html is the physical file of the homepage where you change code. All of these pages are possibilities your homepage (there are more):

http://yourappliancerepairla.com

http://www.yourappliancerepairla.com

https://yourappliancerepairla.com

https://yourappliancerepairla.com

http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html

http://www.yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html

There are more possibilities. That is why the canonical tag is important here. Also consider google search console and setting up properties for http non www, http www, https non www, and https www all pointing to the preferred version of your site which would be the http non www.

[kirupa]

Thank you!