In web marketing, you should always avoid duplication. To avoid issues, make sure you have linked to your homepage the right way. To a search engine, all three of the following URLs are unique pages on the Internet:
www.<i>mydomainname.com</i> <i>mydomainname.com</i> www.<i>mydomainname.com</i>/index.html
Although they’re all pointing to the same page, search engines see each URL as unique. This is the most common form of duplication on the web.
If you have your homepage in a file called index.html and you link to it three different ways, search engines will find it at those three locations, with the exact same content. The search engine then has to figure out which page is the real page and ignore the rest.
In the worst case, other folks randomly link to each of the three addresses. You do the same on your own website. Search engines find all three links, splitting the relevance votes those links can deliver. Instead of getting three votes to one page, you get one vote each on three different pages that all compete with each other for authority in the search engines.
You can use a simple fix. Always link to your homepage exactly like this:
http://www.<i>yoursiteaddress</i>.com
Exactly like that, except replace yoursiteaddress with your actual website address.
Then, set up a 301 redirect from yoursiteaddress.com to www.yoursiteaddress.com.
That will reduce link confusion and prevent homepage duplication.
