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When I view my site with Webmaster Tools, under HTML improvements, it shows 2 pages under duplicate meta tags and duplicate title tags.
The pages are the root ‘/’ and the ‘index.php’.
I have since added the to my index page.My question, is the duplicate page which is really the same page hurting my rankings?
Hope I’m making sense.
It is not hurting your rankings, please do not worry. These things will come and go over time and it takes a very long time for tools to reflect the changes. It never made sense to me and I freaked-out for a long time trying to figure out why, or how to fix it, but in the end… search is smarter than web-tools lol. It will eventually go away with the canonical tag.
Thanks for the feedback.
I just added the tag the other day. I did always think it wasn’t good to have the duplicate content thingy but never really knew how to take care of it. This is gonna be my first site that I’m ‘trying‘ to make SEO friendly.
Now I’m already learning techniques of using mod_rewrite to take care of this problem also.
I would not add a restrictive meta tag to your index! / and /index.xxx are the same page, make sure you do not link to /index.xxx anywhere and do not worry about this one.
@allfreechips 251937 wrote:
I would not add a restrictive meta tag to your index! / and /index.xxx are the same page, make sure you do not link to /index.xxx anywhere and do not worry about this one.
I didn’t add a restrictive tag ( not sure what that is ). I know that the root ‘/’ and ‘index.php’ are the same so I added the tag to my ‘index.php’ so both could be treated as one page and not a duplicate.
Is this not a good thing?
Yes it is a good thing. Canonical simply tells everything how the site prefers to be represented contextually. Have you seen the settings in webmaster tools that allows you to set your preferred domain (www. or not)? Imagine the canonical tag as being the same, but only on page levels. So why would we want to add a tag like this?
As allfreechips points out, you do not want people linking to the wrong page contextually in the url. If someone is on a forum somewhere and the are like “oh yeah you got to check out xxx.usaonlinecasino/bonus cause I know you will find the bonus you’re looking for” with no canonical tag, and with other people linking to the site above with no www, both will be indexed and then possibly penalized for dup content.
Thankfully this tag does NOT restrict anything at all. It only tells search engines which is the real page the webmaster prefers to be visible.
Matt Cutts: “Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as [HTML]http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265[/HTML] can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:[HTML] [/HTML]That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is [HTML]http://example.com/page.html[/HTML] instead of [HTML]http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265[/HTML] .”
