How do fix twin home pages

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

Hi Final Frontier,

Most hosting providers will likely add this to your .htaccess file for you if you contact technical support. I know HostGator will happily provide that kind of help. If not, I'd be glad to add the lines if you'll download the file and email it to me.

[finalfrontier]

How big of an issue is this for search engines?  I'm indexed in Bing, Google, Yahoo.

I'm curious as to how big (or small) an impact this really has on a website.

thx.

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

It can have a pretty major impact on search rankings. Basically what's happening is you have two identical pages for every intended page on your site. So it creates duplicate content issues.

So for example...

Someone finds something on your site that they like at www.yoursite.com/example/ and links to it from their site or shares it on Twitter, which increases the ranking power for that page.

Another person finds the same content at yoursite.com/example/ and links to it as well.

Instead of consolidating all the benefits of links to your site onto a single page, you're basically reducing your ranking potential by 50%.

[Dr-Pete]

Since this issue can occur site-wide, I do tend to agree with Anton that 301-redirects are a better solution for this particular problem (although canonical tags will work, if that's your only feasible option). It is important, as implied in the comments, to make sure hat your internal links are consistent and you aren't using both versions in your site (although, with "www" vs. non-www, that's pretty rare).

Practically, it depends a lot on the size of your site, whether you have links to both versions, and whether Google has indexed both version. This is a problem in theory, but it may not currently be a problem on your site. You can check the indexed pages of both the root domain and www subdomain separately in Google with these commands:

site:mysite.com inurl:www

site:mysite.com -inurl:www

(the first pulls up anything with "www", and the second only pages without it).

If you're seeing both in play, then sorting out how to do the 301-redirects is a good bet. If you're not, then it's still a solid preventive measure, but you don't need to panic.

[finalfrontier]

Thanks for your post.

Google is indexing all my www pages (including www.mysite.com), but (I guess this is good news?) no documents show up for the:

site:mysite.com -url:www

in Google.

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, it sounds like you're not currently having major issues. I think it's good to prevent these issues (and duplicates are a real concern), but you can ease into this one, I strongly suspect.

[finalfrontier]

Well, this isn't making any sense.

I made the following change to my .htaccess file - followed the instructions given my my web host:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com

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

Then I ran another seoMoz root crawl a couple hours later and it still said I had the same errors on my home page (duplicate home page content and titles).

I just checked my .htaccess file again and it did save those 301 redirect changes.  So why am I still getting duplicate page errors?  thx.

[Dr-Pete]

It could just be a time-lag in our data (and that wouldn't shock me), but run a header checker and make sure the 301 is working properly. For example, try this:

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

[finalfrontier]

If you look at the redirect code the webhost provided in their instructions, I notiched there is not a [NC] at the end of the Rewrite Cond line.   I'm not sure if that [NC] is necessary or not.

Other than that and the possible time-lag you speak of, I'm at a loss.

[ChrisCountey]

Hi FinalFrontier,

I agree with setting up a 301 redirect to a single version. I also recommend doing the following:

• Set up canonical URLs to your desired version
• Ensure that your XML sitemaps use your desired version
• Add both www and non-www to Google Webmaster Tools and select one as the URL you'd like displayed in search results

Best of luck!

Chris