Q and A: Why is Google indexing 2 different pages as the same ?

Question

Hello Kalena,

Something weird is going on with my website, which is the fact that google started indexing 2 different pages as one page. So now: www.mysite.com/index.htm (actual site provided) and www.mysite.com are indexed as the same page, though they are different pages. And when you view the cache of www.mysite.com/index.htm it gives you the cache of www.mysite.com. Can you please advise?

Regards, Mais

Dear Mais

I’ve looked at the URLs (provided), and yes indeed, the pages you’ve referenced are in fact completely different. It appears that you have an index.php (the default home page) and a different page at index.htm.

Historically there have been a number of “standard” or “default” filenames used for home pages (see list below), and the order of precedence for these is determined by your server configuration.

I suspect that the problem you’ve experienced has been caused by confusion (by the search engines) over which page is in fact your default one. I recommend that you rename your index.htm to something else (and adjust the links to it accordingly).

Listed below is a (possibly incomplete) list of the filenames that could be setup as a default home page.

To save confusion, I suggest that you try to have ONLY ONE of these files existing in any one directory. This list is roughly in order of precedence (but can vary depending on server configuration) :

1. default.html
2. default.htm
3. index.php
4. index.shtml
5. index.html
6. index.htm
7. home.html
8. home.htm
9. index.php5
10. welcome.html
11. welcome.htm

Regards,

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

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