Canonical home page

[Marvo]

I have a site that shows duplicate page content for:

www.autoserviceexpertsonline   and   www.autoserviceexpertsonline/index.html

When looking at the files using the cms (intuit) file manager, I only see the /index.html version.

I added the Caononical tag referencing/pointing to both the domain name only and then changed to .../index.html

No matter how I code this, the seomoz On-Site SEO Grader still has a problem with it.

Is this a bug with the Grading program or am I doing something wrong?

Please help as I think this is causing me problems with Google and I'd like to get this right for future sites I will be working on.

Thanks,

Bill

[networkelites]

Hi Bill,

Two questions:

1. Are you sure you formatted the tag properly?

2. Are you waiting until the following Tuesday for your site to be recrawled?

[Marvo]

I think it is coded correctly.

No, I'm not waiting until Tuesday... didn't realize there was a weekly time-frame on the SEO Report Card Tool.

[mattbeswick]

Hi Bill,

I've just had a look at your site and the canonical tag is set as:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/index.html"/>

I'd advise changing it so that index.html isn't included (simply because that's the most likely way that people are going to link to you and how they'll get to your site, so it makes sense that the canonical tag points to the most popular 'page' in the eyes of both users and search engines). So, you'd end up with:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/"/>

The error that you're getting through the Report Card may appear if you're checking the base URL of your site (http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/) as SEOMoz would see your canonical tag pointing to a different place (index.html) and therefore being incorrect.

My advice would be to do the fix (as above) and recheck your page through SEOMoz immediately - you shouldn't need to wait until the following Tuesday when using the report card tool as it does an immediate refresh of the page content.

Also, to explain why you only see index.html in the file manager (in simple terms) is that the webserver (apache) sees index.html as being the base file for your site. So, when someone goes to http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/ apache grabs the index.html file and shows it on the page.

Hope that's helpful - let me know if you have any more questions,

Matt

[Marvo]

Thank you very much for the clear answer and the time it took you look at the site and write your post.

I will follow the instructions and see if things clear up.  I have this site set up on Campaign mode, so tomorrow it should get a full crawl and then we'll know if the Duplicate Page error goes away (which is the reason for this whole exercise).

Have a blessed day.

[mattbeswick]

No problem at all - good luck!