Twin Home Pages
Having Twin Home Pages has been a classic SEO mistake for many years and to come. It’s often unnoticed making it most common mistake.Though many CMS like Word Press have solved it, still Drupal 7.15, Joomla 2.5.6 displayed the same home page for few URL when tested.I have submited the issue to the community hoping it get solved in next update or next release.
Having Twin home pages can reduce number of links coming to your web site. For example imageine that many websites link your home page as YourSite.com and in your internal menu you link your home page as YourSite.com/index.php (or any). The search engines take them as two different pages and you can loose your rank in searches.Incoming links can help a web page get better rankings in search results is called “link juice”.
It can be solved by small tweeks. Our article does not cover on tweeks but we have an article on solving Twin Home Pages with HTACCESS
Default Document Issue
Default document is request whenever a request arrives for your site’s or application’s root directory, the common default document being
- index.html
- index.php
- Index.htm
- Default.asp
- Default.htm
- Iisstart.htm
The same content will be displayed even if requested mentioning the default document, many people think that as same page but technically all of these pages are different. Search Engines take them as different page and it causes a duplicate content.
When People link to your sites home page they can use the empty one or use the default document, when search engines run through those links they find two different pages, this reduces number of links to your site.
You can check our article on Default Document to Domain redirect for more details.
Forward Slash Issue with Directory
If you have added the code for Default Document to Domain redirect in the htaccess file in root directory then it wll work for the sub directories as well.
That does not solve all the problem,there is still one more, i.e there can be request for a directory with and withour forward slash like YourSite.com/folder and YourSite.com/folder/ for search engines these are different pages. You need to choose a prefered one i.e with or without forward slash then make a 301 permenant redirect to other.
You can check the post on our forum one how to Insert a forward slash for directory in htaccess .
