Am I correctly handling duplicate URLs for my homepage?
- by Rob Goldstein
I own a Job Search site named www.conservationjobboard.com and have a concern about how the domain is viewed by search engines. The issue is that when the site was first designed, the default page was left as default.php, but the homepage was actually JobBoard.php. To handle this, the default.php page performed a redirect to the JobBoard.php file when www.conservationjobboard.com/ was requested.
The main problem resulted because the redirect was a temporary redirect causing search engines to index conservationjobboard.com/ and conservationjobboard.com/JobBoard.php as 2 separate pages. This has since been corrected to use the .htaccess file so that JobBoard.php is now the default file for the root directory eliminating the need for the redirect. Problem is that search engines still show both URL's in search results (one including JobBoard.php and one that ends with /).
Another potential problem is that some of my early backlinks are to conservationjobboard.com/JobBoard.php while the rest are to conservationjobboard.com
The 2 outstanding questions are as follows: 1. Is my domain still being penalized by search engines like Google for having duplicate homepage URL's? 2. Are all of the back links to my homepage being considered as the same now or is the total number of back links being split between the 2 different URL's?
If you think there are still issues with how we have this set-up, I was wondering if you could give me advice on what we should do differently.
Thanks.
