Recently I learned of a trick I could do in .htaccess to redirect my index.html to just the domain name, to eliminate having two paths to it and what could be seen as duplicate content. So "index.html" in other words never displays, it is used as the default path for the domain and not it's own separate file. So I have that all taken care of and also redirect the www. address for my site so it isn't perceived as duplicate. I am just wondering now if I should use the first technique on all folders and sub-folders on my site that have an index file as well.
Google is pretty good at sorting this out these days but it is still my first order of business when I take a new seo client. Especially the www bit. That is a fairly common mistake. I would say if its not too time consuming its certainly a sound idea. hope that helps, Nigel
Ehh what? This is really just a good coding practice. Why do you think wordpress will do this by default? Nothing tricky about it. Nigel
Well technically without the mods it's more or less tricking. It is highly regarded that duplicate paths are not a good idea so you use rewrite methods in .htaccess and also can use 301 redirect for some stuff. Even if it is outdated, It is still suggested by Google. It makes it a lot easier for them to have one clear path, rather than being able to reach your site domain name, and then the index page which could be seen as duplicate content, though it's not, and that's kind of the point. It's not duplicate content but the default structure can make it seem that way.
I agree completely. Wordpress for instance does this by default once you set your permalinks. It is simply good coding practice to not have multiple urls serving the same content. This is common problem with e-commerce solutions as well. The fellow above me seemed to think its bad form to rewrite urls to avoid this. There is nothing hokey about using apache directives to clean things up. Rule of thumb, code stuff properly. That is not a stab at you by any stretch. Just pointing out the obvious. To my knowledge I have really only seen dup content issues by having the exact same content on two different domains. Nigel
Yeah, I suffered a setback a while ago on one of my sites that took me a bit by surprise, though I should have known better, and i know what caused it, i am still trying to be much more precocious. I'm currently working on a new project and i want that to be nice and tight from the get go. It's my understanding that 301 Redirects are better for multiple domains than using canonical names, duplicate URLs in other words.
Webmaster tools largely handles canonical issues now. I have not used the tag much though for sorting out www v. non www issues. htacess is fine. There should be no issues rewriting index.whatnot to / either but its of course preferable to handle that in the code or cms. That said, there are plenty of apps like zencart that are all over the place code wise that seem to do just fine in spite of conventional wisdom. Nigel
OHHH yeah.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hSoXutuj0g nerdtastic viewing as I suspected, logic prevails 301 for the win. About half way through the vid he addresses this specifically. Even better... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM&feature=channel EDIT: and sweet, I actually learned something around the 12 minute mark lol... off to test that bit now. Nigel