WMT says my home page has a duplicate title

[docj]

I just noticed in Webmaster Tools that Google is showing a duplicate page title for my home page... the conflicting urls are actually the same page www.example.com/ and www.example.com/index.aspx! What on earth am I doing wrong?

[tedster]

Those may be the same "page" - as in displaying the same content - but they are definitely two different urls, and technically they could each display different content. So Google treats them as unique.

See [webmasterworld.com...] for more discussion.

[g1smd]

Redirect the named index file to the bare "/" URL and the problem is on the way to being solved.

Make sure that all of your internal links all point to the shorter of the two URLs too.

[tedster]

That is definitely the best practice, but such a redirect may be touchy on a Windows IIS server - and since you have a .aspx extension, I assume that's what you are using. The challenge to guard against is introducing an infinte loop, where index.aspx >> www.example.com >> index.asp >> www.example.com - on and on and on.

[docj]

We have "www.exmple.com/" redirected to "www.exmple.com/index.aspx" so I was surprised to see this as a problem.

[g1smd]

Google prefers to list the shorter of the URLs when it comes to index pages.

One reason for that, may simply be that listing www.domain.com/ is future-proof.

If you change from index.aspx to index.cfm or index.php then www.domain.com/ will still work, whereas the longer (old) URL will fail.

[tedster]

docj, that's the kind of server configuration that makes for the infinite loop. Before making any changes (if you intend to make changes) I'd suggest studying your current situation on Google very closely - especially if you have that kind of redirect in place for internal directories.

[docj]

i take back my last post... after studying the redirect file some more, it looks like we have the old index.html redirecting to index.aspx... I'm thinking that if we redirect index.html to www.exampple.com/ it will work itself out

[docj]

tedster, wouldn't redirecting www.example.com/index.aspx to www.example.com/ be the configuration that causes the infinite loop?

[tedster]

Yes, IF the server is set to redirect http://www.example.com/ >> http://www.example.com/index.aspx, as some IIS servers are configured.

It's much better, as g1smd pointed out above, to let the domain root and any folder root resolve exactly as they stand. Then even if you change server technology, at least all those url will not change - and they are often significant magnets for search traffic.