Duplicate Content Showing up on Moz Crawl | www. vs. no-www.

[MarketingChimp10]

Hello Moz Community!

I am new to SEO, Moz and this is my first question.

My questions; I have a client that is getting flagged for Duplicate Content. He is getting flagged for having two domains that have the same content i.e. www.mysite.com & mysite.com.

I read into this and set up a 301 redirect through my hosting site. I evaluated which site had a stronger Page Authority and had the weaker site redirect to the stronger site. However, I am still getting hit for Duplicate pages caused by the www.mysite.com  &  mysite.com being duplicates. How should I go about resolving this? Is this an example of a Canonical tag needed in the head of the HTML?

Any direction is appreciated. Thank You.

B/R

Will H.

[DirkC]

If the redirection was done quite recently - it's possible that Moz hasn't recrawled your site (crawls are once/week)

If this isn't the case - check the http header of the pages which Moz indicates as duplicates, to be sure that they are properly redirected (with a tool like httpstatus.io).

Adding a canonical never hurts but it's better to solve the problem at the root.

Dirk

[MarketingChimp10]

Thanks Dirk!

I did set up the redirect about a week ago. I set it up on Monday or Tuesday. I checked the status using the tool recommend (Thanks for the link), and it indicates that no redirects are set up. I'll give it till Wednesday and retry it. I'm fairly confident the redirect was set up correctly.

[DirkC]

If the header checker indicates that the redirect isn't properly setup you will have to check the redirect rules. You could try to double check with web-sniffer.net. If the redirects are not ok waiting doesn't make sense - Moz will continue to find these errors (and Google as well).

Also indicate the preferred domain in Search Console (you will need to register both of them - the www & non-www version)

Dirk

[MarketingChimp10]

Hello Dirk,

Thanks again for all of your help. So, I ended up not having the redirect setup correctly (I'm a noob!). For whatever reason, I could not setup the redirect using the redirect icon through the panel. I ended up accessing the .htaccess file (which was tough to find because it was hidden!). and I added this code.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.YourDomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://YourDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

All of my redirects are now redirecting from www. To non-www.

I'll have to wait for my next crawl to verify that the duplicate content has cleared, however, the redirect is indicating on httpstatus.io.

Thanks for your assistance Dirk!

B/R

Will