Three urls leading to home page

[djordjew]

Hello everyone,

There is something I was looking at for a long time, but didnt have the time and knowledge to tackle the problem.

Today I noticed that official Joomla site has the same problem as I do, so I'm know clueless is that actually a problem or not.

You can access official Joomla home page by 3 urls:

1. http://www.joomla.org/
2. http://www.joomla.org/index.php
3. http://www.joomla.org/home

First url has google page rank of 9, second url has page rank 3, and third url has no page rank.

For a while I was trying to get rid of /index.php through .htaccess modification, by redirecting domain.com/index.php to domain.com, but although this solved initial problem, I experienced some other problems, so I leaved it as it is.

Now, my question is, do you think these 3 urls are problem or not for SEO? I read some articles that search engines, google at first place, are actually not giving any penalty for this kind of duplicate content, but that page rank could be split between all these pages.

If I had site with traffic as Joomla official website I probably wouldn't mind, but I have site with much smaller traffic and have actually two home pages with PR3 each. Would I had higher PR if my /index.php and /home were redirecting to my base url?

Thanks in advance.

[hardeight44]

A best practice is to have canonical urls. That is you want one main url that has all the page rank. Use a 301 redirect from your less desirable urls to your main url.

[Japanac033]

Yes, that is a problem, if there are more links leading to the same page!

The problem is called "duplicate content" and you are generally penalized for that by the search engines.Search engines want to see fresh and authentic content.

so my suggestion is to make 100% sure that everything is redirected (301) to a single page, preferably a canonical url. Read more on:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advic ... alization/

[ogormask]

Technically they are spreading the page rank between the 3 urls and technically google sees this as 3 seperate sites. People are linking to each site in different amounts which is probably why you see 3 different pageranks. I assume PR9 has the most links.