Duplicate Content – Mysite.com/ vs. Mysite.com/index.html

As I wrote in a previous post, duplicate content on your own website can come in the form of www.mysite.com/ vs. www.mysite.com/index.html. The search engines see this same page as two different ones, but with identical content. As I also mentioned, most search engines are smart enough to figure out that these two pages are the same one, but still, they do share Pagerank.

What to do? That’s easy too. Just open up your .htaccess again and type in the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]

You can do this with other pages that have the same problem as well.