Magento Duplicate Homepage Issue

Duplicate content is an issue on many Magento Ecommerce sites. One serious issue which can occur is the duplication of the homepage. Your homepage is vital in ranking your website for some of your most important keywords, and any link juice leaking out can have serious implications to your website.

How do I know if my Magento site is being penalised for duplicate homepage content?

Webmaster tools is a great tool to check if duplicate content is affecting your site, just log into your webmaster tools account, then go to Search Appearance>Html Improvements. Here you will see the recommendations for improvements on your site. Check the duplicate title tags area. If you see your home page here with various versions “/”, “/index.php/” or “/home/” then there is an issue with the homepage content.

How Can I fix a Duplicate CMS Page in Magento?

There are two main ways of dealing with a duplicate page.

Custom URL Rewrite

You can set up a 301 redirect, which will pass on all of the link juice to the root of your site, or the page you want. In order to set this up for Magento it is a pretty quick fix. By using the Magento URL Rewrite Management, you can permanently 301 redirect /home to / and block /home on your domain from being indexed in search engines. In your Magento admin panel, head to Catalog >>URL Rewrite Management and ‘Add URL Rewrite’. Then fill in as follows;

Type: Custom
Store: Select the appropriate store.
ID Path: home
Request Path: home
Target Path: ../
Redirect: Permanent (301)
Description: Redirects /home to /

You can then do the same for any other duplicates which you see.

Auto Redirect Base-URL using 301 Redirects

Another quick fix which is often overlooked is the base url redirect. As standard this is set to a 302 temporary redirect. This will not pass any link juice through to your root page. Log in to your Magento admin, then go to System > Configuration > General > Web > URL Options. Then change the “Auto-redirect to Base URL” to “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)”. Click Save and this will pass various versions of your homepage to the website base url which you can set just below.