Make an .htaccess file to prevent index page duplicate content issues

When you access your website at 

http://website-checklist.net 

http://website-checklist.net/

http://website-checklist.net/index.html

http://www.website-checklist.net         <  I choose this version

http://www.website-checklist.net/

http://www.website-checklist.net/index.html

the server will serve the same pages, this is duplicate content. To direct all traffic to the www version you need to put this in a notepad file and save it as  .htaccess then put it in your root folder. Replace my url with yours.

#start

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website-checklist\.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.website-checklist.net/$1 [R=301,L]

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://www.website-checklist.net/$1 [R=301,L]

#end

This should fix duplicate content issues for your home page, if this doesn't work or isnt practical, you can find a temporary fix using the next step. Canonical element. 

Once you have sorted your redirects to http://www.mywebsite.com you can now make sure all your links go to that page and not   http://mywebsite.com or http://www.mywebsite.com/index.html

You should go to Google Webmaster Tools and verify both domains http://www.mywebsite.com  and http://mywebsite.com  then you can set your preferred domain to the www version. (http://mywebsite.com)

 This is why we have done the 301 redirects, explained in the video.

Do links to non-canonical URLs pass any value to the canonical version?

Now that you have finished, please try all the variations of domain addresses that I have done above, (inserting your domain of course) check in this tool. Every page, but the one that you have selected to link to, should have a 301 redirect, the page that you have chosen to be your canonical url will give a 200 status.

http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php