Are You Losing Link Power Through Multiple Homepage Versions?

Whilst assessing websites for SEO, we come across the same issue time and time again. One of the most important issues, and one that is easily solved is the existence of multiple versions of the same homepage, splitting link equity, meaning that no one page benefits from the full value. There are 4 common versions of a homepage that we see, and they usually look something like the following:

http://www.site.com/
http://www.site.com/index.html
http://site.com/

http://site.com/index.html

It is surprisingly common for websites to have at least 2, if not all 4 of these versions and sometimes there are even different links to the different home pages within the site itself. The solution to this is to first decide on which homepage to use, this should be the one with most external links to it. You then need to set up 301 redirects from the other pages to the chosen homepage. Then you need to make sure that any links on your site to the homepage are to the correct version.

This will channel all your link equity to the one page so search engines will place more value on your homepage and you may rank higher. This also applies to other pages you may have duplicates of, but from an SEO point of view, it won’t matter as much as with the homepage.