Domain.com and domain.com/ redirect(error)

[cgman]

When I view my campaign report I'm seeing duplicate content/ meta for mydomain.com and mydomain.com/   (with a slash)

I already applied a 301 redirect as follows:

redirect 301 /index.php/ /index.php

Where am I messing up here?

[donford]

After you fixed the issue did you wait till the next report was generated to see if the crawl detected the same error?

[cgman]

Yeah I re-crawled it after applying the 301. Here is my full htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
#Rewrite bare to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [NC,L]

redirect 301 /index.php/ /index.php

Supposed to redirect from nonwww to www, hide .php from pages to look clean: domain.com/category vs domain.com/category.php Then finally redirect index.php/ to index.php

[donford]

Try

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.php\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.php$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Ref:

http://coltoncat.com/apache-redirect-to-root/

[cgman]

That seemed to work somewhat, however the inner page linking broke completely.

domain.com/sample-page

... no longer loads

[cgman]

Anyone have any other ideas?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Cgman,

There are a couple things you can try here. I assume you're using .htaccess for the redirect? I'm not an expert on these, and they can get messed up pretty quickly, but I'd start by listing the full url in the second instance, like this:

Redirect 301 /index.php/ http://www.example.com/index.php

Another easy way to solve this problem is with a canonical tag. Just make sure both pages have a duplicate canonical tag in the section that points to the same target, like this:

To be honest, although these are technically duplicates you are dealing with, Google has publicly stated that trailing slashes aren't that big of deal, so if you can't invest the time in fixing it, it probably won't hurt you that much.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[cgman]

Actually I figured out all of the problems, here is the solution that worked for me:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /#Rewrite bare to www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [NC,L]