Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it a problem to have a homepage with a slug / URL ?
-
Hi,
We are designing a web site for one of our clients, and using a home made CMS.
I don't know how this CMS has been built, but anyways, in the end the homepage has a URL format which looks like this : www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html. No www.mydomain.com.
Is it dangerous for SEO to have a slug/URL directly on the homepage ? Do you have experiences, cases where it has impacted a site negatively ?
The main problem I expect is duplicate content (with Google seeing both www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html as being different pages) but apparently the CMS is doing a 302 redirect from the root domain to the URL (I told my colleague it should at least be a 301).
Sorry if this question seems like basic SEO knowledge, but I really can't find a definitive answer on the subject.
Thank you very much
-
Is it possible for the CMS to include the canonical tags ? I would suggest you look into it and have www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html contain the canonical tag to www.mydomain.com which should also take care of this issue for the homepage. That way Google will deindex www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html and only index www.mydomain.com
-
Yes this is a big problem. You are showing Google, 2 pages with the same content. This would be the case if this were any two pages with the same content on your site.
You definitely need to setup a 301 redirect (and not a 302) the slug to the main page.
You have to be careful with CMS systems. They may be generating a ton of duplicate pages and you are not even aware of it. Check with you IT person, but then look in Google Webmaster Tools and also use other tools to check (e.g spidering tools).
You want each URL on your site to have a unique title tag, description and page content on your site.
Good luck!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is having my homepage on a subfolder harmful?
Hi guys, I am the webmaster of the following two websites: www.gpblog.com/nl
Technical SEO | | NielsDE
www.gpblog.com/en The first URL is the Dutch version of GPBlog, the second URL is the UK version of GPblog. Whenever a person visits www.gpblog.com he gets redirected to either the Dutch version or the UK version based on his location. My question is: is it harmful to have 1. your homepage on a subfolder and 2. is it harmful to run two different languages on one domain using this technique? Thank you in advance!1 -
2 Versions of Same Homepage
We want to show new and returning visitors different versions of our homepage (same URL) What, if anything, should we use as the markup to tell Google what we are doing?
Technical SEO | | theLotter
Any danger that Google will think we are cloaking? Thanks!0 -
Are thousands of 404s a problem?
An ecommerce site I work on has around 16,000 URLs that are 404s in Webmaster Tools. The vast majority are for products that are no longer stocked by the site, which is a natural occurrence in ecommerce. But my question is, could these possibly be harming rankings?
Technical SEO | | creativemay1 -
Why do some URLs for a specific client have "/index.shtml"?
Reviewing our client's URLs for a 301 redirect strategy, we have noticed that many URLs have "/index.shtml." The part we don'd understand is these URLs aren't the homepage and they have multiple folders followed by "/index.shtml" Does anyone happen to know why this may be occurring? Is there any SEO value in keeping the "/index.shtml" in the URL?
Technical SEO | | FranFerrara0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
/~username
Hello, The utility on this site that crawls your site and highlights what it sees as potential problems reported an issue with /~username access seeing it as duplicate content i.e. mydomain.com/file.htm is the same as mydomain.com~/username/file.htm so I went to my server hosts and they disabled it using mod_userdir but GWT now gives loads of 404 errors. Have I gone about this the wrong way or was it not really a problem in the first place or have I fixed something that wasn't broken and made things worse? Thanks, Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Redirecting blog.<mydomain>.com to www.<mydomain>.com\blog</mydomain></mydomain>
This is more of a technical question than pure SEO per se, but I am guessing that some folks here may have covered this and so I would appreciate any questions. I am moving from a WordPress.com-based blog (hosted on WordPress) to a WordPress installation on my own server (as suggested by folks in another thread here). As part of this I want to move from the format blog.<mydomain>.com to www.mydomain.com\blog. I have installed WordPress on my server and have imported posts from the hosted site to my own server. How should I manage the transition from first format to the second? I have a bunch of links on Facebook, etc that refer to URLs of the blog..com format so it's important that I redirect.</mydomain> I am running DotNetNuke/WordPress on my own IIS/ASP.Net servers. Thanks. Mark
Technical SEO | | MarkWill0
