I'm getting a Duplicate Content error in my Pro Dashboard for 2 versions of my Homepage. What is the best way to handle this issue?

[DerekM88]

Hi SEOMoz,I am trying to fix the final issues in my site crawl. One that confuses me is this canonical homepage URL fix. It says I have duplicate content on the following pages:http://www.accupos.com/http://www.accupos.com/index.phpWhat would be the best way to fix this problem? (...the first URL has a higher page authority by 10 points and 100+ more inbound links).Respectfully Yours,Derek M.

[KaneJamison]

You're going to want to implement a 301 redirect of http://www.accupos.com/index.php to to http://www.accupos.com/

You'd also want to add rel="canonical" tags to your index.php file to supplement the redirection, which will look like this:

Other reading:

• Read more about redirects here http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
• More info on how redirects work: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work
• Visit this page and scroll down to the URL Structure section and start reading: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development
• Also worth reading up on, but be careful with this one, it's trickier to implement: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

[DerekM88]

Thanks for the reply. I read up a bit on rel=canonical today and as far as I understand, it's a tool to pass on link juice and page rank, correct?

If this is true, why would I be getting tons of "Alerts" about my blog (located as a subdomain) because the "All In One SEO Pack" Plugin added them to about 90+ of our blog posts.

This just confuses me on the whole about how the rel=canonical is properly used. Does it always have to supplement 301 redirects? Or can/should it be used without it?

Sorry for the confusion. To me, this is a very easy thing to mess up!

Derek M

[Dr-Pete]

The 301 and canonical can be used to solve similar issues, so it gets confusing. For home pages, I think the canonical is a good route, because it "sweeps" up other variants as well. For example, someone might hit your home-page without the "www" with an affiliate ID, etc. One canonical tag on the home-page prevents all of that.

The "alerts" in our system can be a bit hyperactive. Usually the All-In-One canonicals are solid. We're probably just giving you a general warning, but it's tough to tell without a specific page.