/ and /index.php : 2 different pages for Google?

[Polo75]

Hi folks

When I look on my log files, I see:
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 13318 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
and further:
"GET /index.php HTTP/1.0" 200 13318 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

For me / and /index.php are the same pages because the starting page of my site is written in PHP.

Does Google consider them as 2 different pages (In this case, I might be penalise for duplicate content)?

Thanks for helping.

[steveb]

yes

[BigDave]

Odds are that *you* are the one linking to your home page as index.php at times. Fix that and the problem should go away.

[nutsandbolts]

Yes, again. An old site of mine was stung by this last week - didn't notice I had linked directly to the index.php page in the internal site structure since way back in 99... ;)

[Import Export]

This talk made me think back to an old 99er. I also have a site which I am in fact linking to both the domain and also to index.php. Not sure if this raises more questions, however (in TB) the G DIR icon lights up green for this particualr sites domain, and also again for the index.php page. So if it were treating them as completely seperate pages, wouldn't I need 2 links from the G DIR....

[BigDave]

Google can, and often does, eventually merge them. It is much less likely with a .php than a .html. And if it is .php because it changes all the time, it will never get merged because something is different.

[g1smd]

Google can combine results for two different URLs and treat them as one URL, but they only run that process over their database a couple of times per year.

There are two issues:
- linking to a domain or folder compared to linking to just the filename (for index pages, just link to the domain or folder, and do not state the file name).
- using non-www and www versions of the domain (set up a 301 redirect to direct all non-www traffic to the www version).