Duplicate Content Question

[santiago23]

Brief question -

SEOMOZ is teling me that i have duplicate content on the following two pages

http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/

and http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/index.asp

The default page for the /visas/ directory is index.asp - so it effectively the same page - but apparently SEOMOZ and more importantly Google, etc treat these as two different pages.

I read about 301 redirects etc, but in this case there aren't two physical HTML pages - so how do I fix this?

[Matt-Williamson]

There doesn't need to be two physical pages when you are creating a 301 redirect as you are essentially creating a rule which is separate to the physical pages which says page version 2 is at version 1 permanently. Have a look at this guide - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

I would redirect your visas/index.asp to visas/ as visas/ is also the address of a directory and so you don't want all directory pages redirecting to /index.asp as a directory will contain multiple pages..

[danatanseo]

Hi Santiago,

The best way to resolve this problem is to use a rel="canonical" tag in your source code section. It would look something like this:

It will take some time for Google to recognize that the tag is in place. So you will have to be a little patient for GWT to pick up on the fact that the tag is there. Additionally, you could submit the default URL in GWT to have that URL removed from Google's index, but I would run it through OSE first to see if it has any significant inbound links and if it does it may be best to leave that alone. Also, you should know that even if Google doesn't index the page it could still identify it as having a duplicate content issue.

I hope that's a little helpful!

Dana

[dawnieando]

Hi Santiago,

I would echo Dana on this with a rel="canonical".  Like yourself, we also have a site which has a non root home page which has caused similar problems.  I'm always a little fearful of asking Google to remove a URL from the index, hence it's important that you do something like a rel="canonical".  If you're anything like you 301'ing a page such as this could cause some tech issues on a wider scale.  If you're link building you need to ensure you sort it a.s.a.p., not just for your own link building efforts but to avoid natural link building from others wanting to link to your site and choosing the wrong duplicate URL.  Diluted link juice is so frustrating.

Hope this helps.

Dawn