Duplicate homepage on Windows server running Coldfusion

[acee]

I can see in webmaster tools Google is picking up my core domain and index.cfm as duplicate content.

Using cgi elements it appears to be impossible to differentiate between the 2 and my hosting company assures me that setting up a 301 redirect in the IIS control panel results in an infinite loop.

I was under the impression that Google had some way of determining which was most likely to be the correct homepage in these situations, so I'm concerned to see it appearing in the Duplicate Title tags.

Is there any way to resolve this on a windows server?

[FireFleur]

Change the extension to .htm or .html would probably do it.

You then need to change how the server decides to pass to coldfusion.

To be honest I don't think it is that big a deal, google will generally go to the domain, and you are getting the duplicate probably on a sitemap or a link, in which case delete from the sitemap.

[acee]

That might work short term, but I could still end up in the same situation.

I have scripts running in the homepage, so I'm stuck with the index.cfm as the default.

Ideally I need to detect the page being called, but IIS appears to append this to the core domain automatically so you can't differentiate between the 2!

[DotNetWebs]

Hi there is a new URLRewrite module for IIS7 which gets around the problem of 'circular loops' when rewriting your home page to the root domain.

Here is a post about this I made earlier:

http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=80414

Regards

Dotty

[acee]

Cheers Dotty, that looks very interesting.

I'll pass it on to my hosting company who should be aware of this really!

I've spent days searching for a solution without success. What's needed is a really good search engine!

[openmind]

I'm slightly confused, do you have two default documents in your web root, on with a cfm extension and one with another?

[DotNetWebs]

I'm slightly confused, do you have two default documents in your web root, on with a cfm extension and one with another?

I think he means WT sees domain/ and domain/index.cfm as duplicate content.

This can happen if you have have internal or inbound links pointing to the two different URLs (but the same physical page).

Regards

Dotty

[openmind]

Ah OK, very odd as index.cfm is treated just the same as any other extension...

[DotNetWebs]

Ah OK, very odd as index.cfm is treated just the same as any other extension...

True but Google sees it as a:

Canonical URL (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/)

Regards

Dotty

[acee]

This has only recently become an issue on my sites and I've been unable to find any external links to the index page.

Even if there are internal or external links, I would have thought that Google could compare them, choose the one with the most internal links, then drop the other from the index.

Or perhaps if you could declare your default homepage as you can choose now in WMT between www and non-www.

[FireFleur]

If you have lots of duplicate content that would be a problem, but the DirectoryIndex is the tough one.

I have debated a few ways to do this, and have settled on always refering to the directory, except on the domain, which I don't add a slash but reference directly.

But, it would be better to refer to the file in the directory I suspect, I just like shorter URLs and use directories to show sections, so it makes more sense.