• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. Digital Marketing
        3. Web Design
        4. Duplicate Content for index.html

        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.

        Duplicate Content for index.html

        Web Design
        5
        9
        4851
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • superTallDan
          superTallDan last edited by

          In the Crawl Diagnostics Summary, it says that I have two pages with duplicate content which are:

          www.mywebsite.com/

          www.mywebsite.com/index.html

          I read in a Dream Weaver tutorial that you should name your home page "index.html" and then you can let www.mywebsite.com automatically direct the user to index.html.  Is this a bug in SEOMoz's crawler or is it a real problem with my site?

          Thank you,

          Dan

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • SEMCLIX
            SEMCLIX @superTallDan last edited by

            The code should definitely go into the websites root directory's .htaccess, however .htaccess can be weird, a few days ago I ran into a similar issue with a client's website, and I was able to remedy the issue with a variation of the code.

            index Redirect RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)index.(php|html|htm|asp)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/))index.(php|html|htm|asp)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

            If you give me the URL for the site I will take a look at it and let you know what would be feasible.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • KeriMorgret
              KeriMorgret @superTallDan last edited by

              Hi Daniel, can you share with us the URL of your site? We can take a look at it and give you a more precise answer that way. Thanks!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • superTallDan
                superTallDan @SEMCLIX last edited by

                I eventually figured out that your method was a 301 redirect and I definitely broke my site trying to use the code you posted. .. haha.  Its ok though.  I just removed the code and it went back to normal.  At first, I was editing the .htaccess file in the public_html folder which wasnt working.  Then I tried the root folder for the site (I created the .htaccess file since it did not exist.)  Neither of those worked.  (I am using Bluehost so I do not think that I have root access and I am not sure if it is a Linux server or not.)

                If there is an easy way to explain what I am doing wrong, please do so.  Otherwise, I will use canonical.

                Thanks for everything!

                KeriMorgret SEMCLIX 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • SEMCLIX
                  SEMCLIX last edited by

                  @Dan

                  Thanks for your reply.  It seems like there are lots of different ways to solve this problem.  I just watched this video on Matt Cutt's blog where he discusses his preference for 301 redirects over rel canonical tag.

                  Where would you say your solution fits in?

                  sorry about the delay of this response, i didn't realize the that you were asking me a question right away. When placing the code I provided in my previous answer this will cause a 301 perminant redirect to the original URL. That's actually what the

                  [R=301,L]

                  portion of the code is stating (R) redirect (301) status is referring to. After reviewing the Matt Cutts video, I realize that I should have asked you if you were operating on a Linux server  that you had root access to. We actually utilize both redirects and canonical tags since it was recommended by the on-page optimization reports. Heck Google uses them, I would assume because it's easier for the user to be referred to a single page URL. Obviously though if you don't have server header access, and are not familiar with .htaccess (you can accidentally break your site) then the canonical solution is appropriate

                  superTallDan 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • superTallDan
                    superTallDan @SEMCLIX last edited by

                    Josh,

                    Thanks for your reply.  It seems like there are lots of different ways to solve this problem.  I just watched this video on Matt Cutt's blog where he discusses his preference for 301 redirects over rel canonical tag.

                    Where would you say your solution fits in?

                    Thanks,
                    Dan

                    watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • usaccess608
                      usaccess608 last edited by

                      use the link rel tag for all my homepages for the http://www.yoursite.com

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • SEMCLIX
                        SEMCLIX last edited by

                        Odd enough I just recently answered this question. The SEOmoz crawler is correct, because without a redirect you will be able to access both versions of the page in your browser.

                        www.yoursite.com/

                        www.yoursite.com/index.html

                        To resolve this issue simply rewrite the index.html to the root url by placing the following code into your .htaccess file into your root directory.

                        Options +FollowSymlinks                                                                                                            RewriteEngine on

                        Index Rewrite                                                                                                                                RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]                                      RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.yoursite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

                        You can also do the same with the index file in any subdirectories that you might create, by simply placing a .htaccess into those sub directories and using variations of the above code. This is how you create nice tight URLs without the duplicate content issue that look like - http://www.semclix.com/design/business/

                        superTallDan 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                        • RyanKent
                          RyanKent last edited by

                          It is a problem which you need to fix. You need to canonicalize your pages.

                          www.mywebsite.com

                          www.mywebsite.com/

                          www.mywebsite.com/index.html

                          mywebsite.com/

                          mywebsite.com/index.html

                          Those are all various URLs which most likely lead to the same web page. I say "most likely" because these URLs can actually lead to different pages.

                          You need to tell crawlers and search engines how you organize your site. There are several ways to achieve canonicalization. The method I prefer is to add the following line of code to each page:

                          The URL provided should be the preferred URL for your page.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • vtmoz

                            Any risks involved in removing a sub-domain from search index or completely taking down? Ranking impact?

                            Hi all, One of our sub-domains has thousands of indexed pages but traffic is very less and irrelevant. There are links between this sub-domain to other sub domains of ours. We are planning  to take this subdomain completely. What happens if so? Google responds for this with a ranking change? Thanks

                            Web Design | | vtmoz
                            0
                          • SEOguy1

                            Https pages indexed but all web pages are http - please can you offer some help?

                            Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version.  I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards

                            Web Design | | SEOguy1
                            0
                          • CliqStudios

                            Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content

                            I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd

                            Web Design | | CliqStudios
                            0
                          • Atlanta-SMO

                            ECWID How to fix Duplicate page content and external link issue

                            I am working on a site that has a HUGE number of duplicate pages due to ECWID ecommerce platform.  The site is built with Joomla!  How can I rectify this situation?  The pages also show up as "external " links on crawls...  Is it the ECWID platform?  I have never worked on a site that uses this. Here is an example of a page with the issue (there are 6280 issues) URL: http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spare-parts?Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560081

                            Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO
                            0
                          • mdorville

                            Subdomains, duplicate content and microsites

                            I work for a website that generates a high amount of unique, quality content. This website though has had development issues with our web builder and they are going to separate the site into different subdomains upon launch. It's a scholarly site so the subdomains will be like history and science and stuff. Don't ask why aren't we aren't using subdirectories because trust me I wish we could. So we have to use subdomains and I'm wondering a couple questions. Will the duplication of coding, since all subdomains will have the same design and look, heavily penalize us and is there any way around that? Also if we generate a good amount of high quality content on each site could we link all those sites to our other site as a possible benefit for link building? And finally, would footer links, linking all the subdirectories, be a good thing to put in?

                            Web Design | | mdorville
                            0
                          • NoahsDad

                            Facebook code being duplicated? (Any developers mind taking a peek?)

                            I'm using a few different plug ins to give me various Facebook functions on my site. I'm curious there are any developers out there would could take a look at my source code and see if it looks there is some code being duplicated that's slowing down my site. Thanks so much!

                            Web Design | | NoahsDad
                            0
                          • MattWheatcroft

                            How will it affect my site if i link to a site with adult content?

                            We are currently working on creating 2 sites for a company, one with no adult content, one with adult content. Will it affect the non adult content site if i link to the other one in terms of Google and being blocked by some internet providers.

                            Web Design | | MattWheatcroft
                            0
                          • Melia

                            Indexing Dynamic Pages

                            Hi, I am having an issues among others, regarding indexing dynamic pages. Our website, www.me-by-melia, was just put live and I am concerned the bottom naviagtion pages (http://www.me-by-melia.com/#store, http://www.me-by-melia.com/#facebook, etc) will not be indexed and create duplicate pages. Also, when you open these pages in a new tab, it takes you to homepage. The website was created in HTML5. Please advise.

                            Web Design | | Melia
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.