Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform

[anxietycoach]

I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz.  The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage  i.e:  www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url.  Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate.

I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story.  But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually.

I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform.  But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz?

Does anyone know if this is a problem?

If so, does anyone here have a fix?

Thanks in advance.

Sincerely -  Bill in Denver

[Thos003]

I would have stopped at "Website tonight".

You can check Google itself to see if they are indexing both. Just search for both pages.

I believe that website tonight would allow you to add meta tags, so you could try using a canonical tag.

Overall this is probably a minor SEO error. Build all your links to one of the two and Google will figure it out.

And GET AWAY FROM WEBSITE TONIGHT!