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.com/ vs .com/index.html and duplicate content penalty

Question
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I am wondering about a mistake I made that is affecting our site in Google and MSN. I am no webmaster and it took me about a year and a half and untold hrs to get our site rated very high in Google and MSN. All our internal and external (that I am aware of) links exclude the .html and /index.html. About 3 weeks ago I made a few changes to our front page. Like a dumb@$$ I never included our state anywhere in our site. I would use it in our meta tag and descriptions on other sites with inbound links. We dropped like a rock in Google and eventually MSN. I also use Google's webmaster tools(SLOW to update). After about a week and a few hundred in pay per clicks. It finally showed up in the tools, our site.com and our site.com/index , Duplicate content penalty! I hadn't used the webmaster tools in a week or more and after signing in that morning and discovering the problem. I went online that evening to see if I could rectify it. We were back on the front page in Google and the following day, MSN. I joined MSN webmaster tools that following day. I submitted 2 sitemaps to MSN, 1 a text and the other xml. MSN had about 45 of our pages indexed, I had 5 pages of our main site out of 7 (rest are guestbook, and a link directory) Ranking very high in MSN webtools and in search. I sign in this evening, our front page is ranked high, the other 4 dropped like a rock and now only 17 pages total indexed in MSN. I have updated our sitemaps and included .html and /index.html in the sitemaps. Anybody know what else I should do to correct this? I am guessing duplicate content penalty again but no way to check this with the MSN tools that I can see. Competitor using crawl commands causing this? lol, plus my lack of for site. Any suggestions would be appreciated !
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 7:27 AM
Answers
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Hi Mick,
I see that we have 23 pages in our index.
Something to think about: If you are concerned about duplicate content penalties, why not redirect/ canonicalize your site to themargaritamasters.com/ instead of being able to access the site through both the www version and non-www version. You can also canonicalize your site so that if someone types in themargaritamasters.com/index.html it will redirect to themargaritamasters.com/
If you don't know what canonicalization is or how to set it up take a look at these results http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=canonicalizing+using+.htaccess&form=QBRE
Brett
Thursday, January 8, 2009 6:18 PM
All replies
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Hi,
Could you please provide your domain name and I will take a look?
Thanks,
Brett
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 7:40 PM -
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 10:46 PM
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Hi Mick,
I see that we have 23 pages in our index.
Something to think about: If you are concerned about duplicate content penalties, why not redirect/ canonicalize your site to themargaritamasters.com/ instead of being able to access the site through both the www version and non-www version. You can also canonicalize your site so that if someone types in themargaritamasters.com/index.html it will redirect to themargaritamasters.com/
If you don't know what canonicalization is or how to set it up take a look at these results http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=canonicalizing+using+.htaccess&form=QBRE
Brett
Thursday, January 8, 2009 6:18 PM -
the new canonical tag I am now using is in the <head> section of our site. We will be changing hosting companies in the next couple months so we will be able to do as you suggested.
Thanx.
Monday, February 23, 2009 5:46 AM