How do I fix this duplicate content?

[sumbu]

I have a site that I didn't build myself and it seems that the structure is set up so there are essentially two pages that are exactly the same - what is the best solution here?

Thanks in advance.

[bluelambda]

I suggest you edit your .htaccess to put in a mod_rewrite rule to redirect and rewrite the index.php file.

I can't post links yet because my post count is too low. Try to google for "Ultimate Guide to htaccess and mod_rewrite".

Hope that helps.

[Solidsnake]

Honestly, I don't really think that would be a problem...

[sumbu]

Thanks for your responses. I had a look at other sites and it seems pretty common that the home page is also the /index page so maybe not.

Is there a free tool that you can use to check for duplicate pages in your website? I found one that costs $39 but I can't find any free ones.

I have a feeling that there may be some pages where different versions of the same page exsist. It is a really complicated site so the directory structure is very confusing. We cleaned up alot of it but I found two more pages today that look to be the same with a slightly different URL (for instance web/products or web//products).

Any advice?

[bluelambda]

Don't know of any tools. But I usually use the site: search at google and try to weed out any duplicates that I don't want. Usually this isn't a big issue, but when I have 2 duplicate pages I usually want to present only 1 version to the user.

Technically, you can do a 301 redirect so the unwanted page just redirects to the one you want.

[bgmacaw]

It's not a problem unless you're doing it to game search results, which you don't seem to be doing. Google will pick one to display and ignore the other. You can use the canonical attribute to indicate the preferred URL.

[sumbu]

Thanks for that, I didn't think of using the site: search. It turned up about 12 pages I don't want displayed, I will use a redirect for those just in case.

Thanks again!

[CliveG]

It's a good idea to make sure that all of the links within the site that point to the home page link to ... .com/ and not to ... .com/index.php. Do the same when you submit your site to directories etc. and when you get backlinks from other sites.

As others have suggested you could also do a 301 redirect.

This is such a common problem and unlikely to be a source of abuse that I would have thought that Google has some form of override for it, but of course we never know!