MSN has both .com and index.html

[Sabat]

Hoping someone can help me. MSN has both the .com and index.html version of my home page listed in their index. I understand that this can lead to duplicate content issues. I contacted my server and he says that I can't use any of the url code re-writes because I am not on a dedicated server.

I would like to get this fixed but don't know how.

Any suggestions.

Thanks.

 

[IBMan]

im not sure what you mean...your url(which includes the .com) and is most likely just a dns record on a separate DNS server just points to your index.html as a default first page.

 

[Kubel]

IBMan,

Sabat's server uses Apache. Apache has what is called a "DirectoryIndex" directive in its configuration files. Under this directive, there are file names of all the files that Apache will load in place of a directory index (a directory index is the plain white page with a listing of all the files and directories within your current directory).

Since http://www.shlomitoltchik.com/ is a directory of shlomito/public_html/, it too must either use a directory index, or have a directoryindex file replacing it. In this case, it appears to be index.php.

http://www.shlomitoltchik.com/ and http://www.shlomitoltchik.com and http://www.shlomitoltchik.com/index.php are the exact same file (index.php).

What Sabat and his host might be talking about is a rewrite engine (generally shared hosts won't install server-side modifications on request). For Apache, this is usually a modification called "mod_rewrite". Here's a great intro to how it works:

http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html

It seems strange that a host would be running Apache without mod_rewrite (it's a very useful mod).

A simple solution here to avoid apparent duplicate content is to force all URLs to use the full URL of the page.

For instance, when http://www.shlomitoltchik.com/ or http://www.shlomitoltchik.com is visited, http://www.shlomitoltchik.com/index.php appears in the address bar. To a search engine, it will never find or display the other URLs, so it won't confuse them as duplicate content.

You can probably find another fix somewhere to solve this problem, but in the future when your URLs get more complex, you will find mod_rewrite to probably be a requirement if you want to keep your up with SEO.

I don't know if this will completely solve the problem of duplicate content, but you could try moving your homepage to another file (like 0.php). Then make index.php with the following code in it:

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: [url]http://www.shlomitoltchik.com/0.php[/url]" );
?>

When you are done, test it with this link:

http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php

It will check to see if it works smoothly and is friendly for search engines.

Hope this helps.