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I have a website built with html CSS and JavaScript, its working on Firebase platform.

I did a duplicate content test on siteliner.com, the results showed me 100% duplication between index.html file and home page.

Just note that the file I was working on is index.html I don't know if that matters but at the moment the index page's power page is 100 compared to the home page which stands at 33

After reading a little about the topic, I realized that to avoid SEO problems I need to redirect 301. I did redirect from the homepage to index.html.

My question is split into two:

  1. Have I done right by redirecting from the home page to index.html and not vice versa?

  2. Do I need to do something in addition to make sure that there is no harm to SEO?

John Conde
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Avi Veller
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1 Answers1

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I'm not sure why you have two "home pages". Index.html typically is the home page for a lot of web servers (like Microsoft IIS), but you appear to be using it in addition to another page that is marked as "home". If your website is new without external backlinks to index.html, you might just delete it.

However, should need both, the redirect should solve your issue, but the direction of your redirect is totally up to which page you want users to go to. But, by redirecting your home page to index.html, you are forcing everyone who ever goes directly to your site to be redirected which is probably not good. You want to avoid redirects when possible, so it seems better to redirect to your home page from index.html for the few times someone might actually use index.html as the URL.

A better methodology for duplicate pages would simply be to mark your index.html page as cononical with your home page. This would avoid the redirect altogether but tells search engines that your index.html is intentionally duplicate with your home page and that the home page is the original/preferred source.

Trebor
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  • Hi Trebor, the website is new and don't have any important backlinks. When you say "delete" do you mean to ask Google to delete it from index? Offcors I can't really delete index.html because this is the real homepage. – Avi Veller Feb 13 '20 at 16:56
  • @AviVeller I'm confused. In your OP you said you had a home page and index.html. Are you saying your homepage and index.html are the same file? If not, then you should be able to delete index.html. If they are the same file, then I'm not sure why Siteliner is separating / from /index.html. – Trebor Feb 13 '20 at 21:32
  • By homepage are you talking about the root domain. e.g. domain.com/ If so you want to 302 redirect the index.html page to that and add a canonical tag to the page to indicate it is your live home page location. – Tony McCreath Feb 14 '20 at 01:54
  • I am new to the whole topic, so I may be talking in confusing terms, I do not have two physical files of the home page, the only file I created is index.html, but actually the browser has two addresses leading to the same content, one looks like this www.exmple.com and the second are www.exmple.com/index.html, and these two addresses were identified as duplicate content, if I understand correctly by the last comment I need to execute 302 (not 301?)from index.html to the domain path and also add a canonical tag in index.html with adress to the domain root.? Thanks for the comments – Avi Veller Feb 14 '20 at 08:18
  • I don't think you need to do anything. Every website server has a default "home" or root location, which you gave as exmple.com. Root, simply meaning the domain name, without any URI/filename following it. We typically think of it as exmple.com/.

    However, most web servers need a physical file that serves to provide content to the root location, should the user navigate to exmple.com/. In the case of many web servers, this file is simply named index.html. So, in your case index.html and exmple.com/ are one and the same location.

    Maybe @TonyMcCreath sees it differently.

     – Trebor Feb 14 '20 at 15:20
  • Sorry, the 302 was a typo, it should be a 301. Your conclusion is right. redirect and canonical. Double check the redirect does not stop the true hole page using the index.html for its content. It's a minor issue as Google will most likely detect the duplication and canonicalise them anyhow. More of a way to keep things tidy and avoid potential confusion and issues. – Tony McCreath Feb 14 '20 at 22:47