Two home pages?

[Beemer]

One of my campaigns shows duplicate page content for domain xxx and xxx/index. There is only one index (home) page, so why does it report on two?

[CraigAddyman]

I have replied to you inbox message.

[CraigAddyman]

PM me the site if you want and I'll take a look as it's difficult to say if without seeing it

[Beemer]

Guys

I'm sorry. I'm probably either being a little dense here or I have not explained my predicament properly. I'm no techie, so excuse me and the following long explanation.

I've looked up 301 redirect and it suggests creating a .htaccess file with a line that points the old URL and file path to a new one. I don't have an actual file to point from or to other than the domain/index.html file.

I still don't understand why SEOMoz says I have duplicate content on TWO pages - xxx.co.uk and xxx.co.uk/index.html when I only have xxx.co.uk/index.html. I do not have any other home page for the website.

So, I guess I have a couple of questions:

1 - what line of code should be in my .htaccess file when I only have one file, not two.

2 - if I type xxx.co.uk into my browser's address bar, how does the browser know to take me to xxx.co.uk/index?

[CraigAddyman]

The campaign crawler will detect urls regardless of whether they are indexed of not, you should do as EssEEmily says and set up a 301 to the version with the most links if you haven't done already.

Oh and don't think just because one version isn't indexed now, it can still cause you problems down the road especially when linking is involved.

Also when setting up your redirects if you have a small number of links set it up regardless to the xxx/ version as this is the one most likely to be linked to.

[Beemer]

Thanks very much. I'll take a look.

[EssEEmily]

I'm sure someone on here can tell you the technical reason why index pages are created (I have just kind of accepted that they exist), I can tell you how to fix the problem. You will need to set up a 301 redirect from either xxx/index to xxx or xxx to xxx/index. I'd point the redirect to the page with more backlinks.

That should fix your duplicate content problem.