My crawl diagnostic is showing 2 duplicate content and titles.

[JasonHegarty]

First of all Hi - My name is Jason and I've just joined - How you all doing?

My 1st question then:

When I view where these errors are occurring it says www mydomain co uk and www mydomain co uk/index.html

Isn't this the same page? I have looked into my root folder and only index.html exists.

[DanHill]

Hi Jason and welcome to seoMoz!

If you do not have a rewrite in place(in your htaccess file) then both the www.mydomain.co.uk AND www.mydomain.co.uk/index.html will resolve in your browser.  I suggest doing a 301 rewrite and while you're at it make sure you also rewrite all non www varients -> eg http://mydomain.co.uk 301 redirect that to http://www.mydomain.co.uk

You can then go set your preferred version in your Webmaster Tools.

This would be the code for apache(check with your host/developer if you're unsure) :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.co.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

[JasonHegarty]

Hey thanks Daniel cheers for the welcome

That sounds simple but I ain't got a clue how to do this so I'll start searching and let you know my results

Thanks for the lead,

Jason

[JasonHegarty]

Hi quick update:

Just this mean I won't need a canonical tag in my header? Do they do similar things?

I've created the htaccess file and dropped it into my root folder at 1and1 so I guess now I sit back for a re crawl to see if it works?

One more thing. Is this likely to effect rankings?

[Alex-Harford]

It's not essential but still useful to have the canonical tag, it doesn't redirect but tells the crawlers the preferred address if you have more than one page/address containing the same content. It's particularly useful for duplicate content like print versions, or results pages based on query strings.

What you've actioned could improve the rankings to your homepage as before, the search engines will have seen the two addresses as separate pages, therefore competing against each other. When the redirect comes into effect the page authority and other metrics of both will be combined into one.

[JasonHegarty]

Thanks Alex I'll sit back and wait to see! fingers crossed it has a positive effect

[JasonHegarty]

This is what I have added does it look OK?

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^keystonemortgages.co.uk

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.keystonemortgages.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

[DanHill]

Hi Jason

That's perfect(and working) for redirecting all non www pages.  You still need to decide on your original question regarding the index page!

Add the following to your htaccess file after the code you've already added :

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/  
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.keystonemortgages.co.uk/ [R=301,L]

[JasonHegarty]

Thanks Daniel!!!!

Looks like I'll be spending some time in the ol Q&A section