I sometimes get asked the question: “does having both / and /home for a website create “duplicate” home pages and cause Google to blacklist a site, or does it just lower a site’s page rank?” Here’s my take on this issue.
Any time two URLs point to the same page there exists a potential duplicate content issue for Google as they only want to display unique results in their result pages (SERPs). Therefore a unique URL for each page on your website IS desirable. But it’s extremely unlikely that the site would be blacklisted because as we can imagine, millions of websites would be blacklisted if this were the case. It’s possible that there could be “penalties”, especially if you a situation like this:
www.website.com
http://website.com
www.website.com/home
http://website.com/home
all pointed at the home page. Then there could be an issue because Google will generally initially consider the first valuable version of any page that it finds and disregard subsequent ones so the real issue is damage to, or dilution of, your PageRank. We know that valuable inbound links is one of the factors that helps to push up PageRank, so if you have some of your inbound links going to URLs that Google disregards (i.e. one of the above) then you’re diluting your inbound link value and, while that might not cause a real lowering of your website’s rank in the SERPs, then you are probably not getting as high up the Google rankings as you might otherwise. Plus of course we don’t want the ones that Google disregards, or holds down in the results, to include the primary URL (i.e. www.website.com).
Best practice is to 301 redirect all other variations of the URL to your main URL, if possible. There is a great article here that shows you several methods for correctly creating 301 redirects as well as a link to a redirect checker tool.
Author: Ashley Bryan
Webstrategies
Subscribe to our RSS feed
Receive Webstrategies blog posts by Email
www.webstrategies.co.nz
Download the Webstrategies Service List