301 index.html

Is it a problem

[Sparky24]

So in my Weebly account I can do 301 redirects and have had no issues however I have noticed that my site can be found at mysite.co.uk and also at mysite.co.uk/index.html so it feels like a duplication of the home page.

Is this an issue do you think?

Thanks

[Wilburforce]

mysite.co.uk/index.html is the default page shown on your site if no page is specified: if mysite.co.uk is entered in a browser's address bar, the page returned by your server will be mysite.co.uk/index.html, but will usually display in the address bar as mysite.co.uk.

It is not a duplication issue. Leave it as it is.

[not2easy]

Please use example.(com/co.uk/org) to discuss hypothetical domains. The "example" domain does not exist and cannot be bought. It is reserved for this purpose of using a domain name that no one owns.

If you can visit both example.co.uk and example.co.uk/index.html it is a duplicate content issue with Google. You might also find more instances of duplicates such as:
http://example.co.uk
https://example.co.uk
http://www.example.co.uk
https://www.example.co.uk
http://example.co.uk/index.html
https://example.co.uk/index.html
http://www.example.co.uk/index.html
https://www.example.co.uk/index.html
...all showing the same content if you do not use a canonical 301 to declare the location of your content. If your site is hosted on an Apache server, this is usually done in your .htaccess file. (though drag and drop sites might offer other tools.)

BTW - This is not a discussion for the Google SEO and News forum, it is covered in our Apache forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

If you search here for a term like "canonical redirect" you can find examples (thousands of them).

[Sparky24]

OK so that is confusing,

Thank you for the two replies but they contradict each other so some clarity would be helpful.

Secondly not2easy says this thread topic is not a discussion for the Google SEO forum but in your reply you say it is a duplicate issue in Google is that not Google SEO especially since forum members do not agree on the issue?

I will of course use example.co.uk when discussing hypothetical domains.

The reason I posted here is that Weebly is a website software platform the same as Wix etc and as such you have limited access to server side however I will research whether I can upload canonical redirect command on the Weebly platform. I fully understand that custom websites have much more flexibility however hundreds of thousands of small businesses have to use these platforms so it feels reasonably important to clear it up.

Thanks in advance.

[Sparky24]

So as an update I found the resource on Weebly so apologies for not doing that first as it would have made the question slightly different.

So I now would like to alter the secondary point and ask if you could clarify what the tag info would be -

Using Canonical Tags in Weebly
The canonical tag is a basic set of html that you can to any page. It's important to always self reference, basically you have to put the canonical tag on your source page and have it link to itself and also put the tag on the duplicate page and have it link back to the source.
Go to the Pages Tab > Select Your Page > SEO Settings > Header
Copy paste the following html <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com">

The confusion I have with this is that it states to put the tag into the source page and then the duplicate page, trouble is I only have access to one page which in the software is called the homepage, this displays at example.co.uk but I do not have access to an example.co.uk/index.html to put a tag into?

Thanks for your time it is appreciated.

[not2easy]

It is not just Google, it is all search engines. If you can access the same content on multiple URLs it is seen as duplicate. Google sees each URL as a different domain.

My information is related to Apache servers, so it depends on the host. In the case of platforms, they can help you better than forums can because they deal with the situation every day. Their inner workings are not clearly visible to the people you are asking here.

Just because an item might affect SEO, that does not make it necessarily a topic for the Google SEO News forum. I hope that helps to clarify. ;)

[Sparky24]

Thank you

I have uploaded the code to the homepage so will see what happens, Weebly has many good points but tech support is not one of them.

[not2easy]

Sorry, I missed your post about the meta tag for canonical. That is a different kind of canonical tag, informational only. The meta tag in the page header does not provide a 301 redirect, it only lets robots know that the content belongs to the URL in the meta tag.

If you paste the https://example.co.uk/index.html URL in your browser's address bar and it goes to that index page and shows the index.html in the address bar, then there is no domain redirect.

[lucy24]

Just to clarify, there are two kinds of redirect involved here. The only thing they have in common is that both are meant to avoid Duplicate Content, which search engines tend to complain about.

index redirect: take requests for
/directory/index.html
and redirect to
/directory/
alone.

Canonicalization redirect: take requests for
http://example.com/ [and the rest of the URL, if any]
http://www.example.com/
https://example.com/
https://www.example.com/
and redirect three of them to the fourth (in this day & age definitely https rather than http, but with or without www remains your individual choice)

Multiply them up, and you can see that, without a redirect, a given page could be accessed in eight different ways. Octuple Content.

For the exact mechanics and code for both redirects, proceed to the relevant subforum, Apache or IIS.

[Wilburforce]

All this overcomplicates the question. Use a sitemap, which tells Google which URL is canonical, and use the same URL in all internal links.

In 20 years Google has never flagged my Home page as a duplicate using that method (which, incidentally, is recommended by Google), and ALL the variants not3easy and Lucy24 mention find my Home page if entered in an address bar.

The important thing is not which URLs could point to a resource, but which actually do: no SE is going to send a bot after a URL that isn't linked from anywhere, regardless of what anyone enters - or might enter - in an address bar.

The purpose of redirects is to get a redundant URL to the right page. The purpose of canonical statements is to tell SEs which URL is the correct format to use to locate a resource, or which, of similar resources, is the canonical one. In the case of example.com vs example.com/index.html, neither is necessary as long as the sitemap and internal links correspond.

[lucy24]

ALL the variants not3easy and Lucy24 mention find my Home page if entered in an address bar

I should hope so. But do the non-canonical forms remain visible in the address bar, or is the request redirected?

Search engines don't ask for /index.html if they have never seen it anywhere. But they most certainly do ask for with and without www, and http on a site that has long since gone https. (Interesting exception: the Russian search engines Yandex and Mail.ru, once they see that a site is https, will make all future requests only to https, with the occasional exception of the root / presumably to see if it's still getting redirected. They even do this with pages that left the site before it went https.)

[Wilburforce]

@Lucy24

Yes, all accepted, but Sparky24 specifically asks about example.com vs example.com/index.html.

I'm trying to avoid sending the question down a rabbit warren. Putting canonical versions of all pages in a sitemap and using the same versions in all internal links is best practice, and won't cause any problems. Google will treat the sitemap version as canonical and index that, whatever else you do to address the question, and whatever is in the (client) address bar. Google won't then show any potential variants as duplicates UNLESS someone else uses a variant in a backlink (which a self-referencing canonical in the page's HEAD section will usually preventl).

Doing something in .htaccess - not directly possible in Weebly - and potentially getting it wrong is a different matter, but that (or IIS equivalent) is the only server-side way to change what the address bar shows. However, that requires a Rewrite Rule for every variant and, as not2easy points out, is an Apache question, not a Google question.

When I first used whatever GSC was first called - WMT, or did something else precede that? - there was a box to enter your preferred default version on the main site page. If that box still exists, I don't know where they've put it now, but would use that too, if you can find it.