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I tried different sitemap generators and they generate 2 data structures refering to the same webpage: On the beginning:

<url>
    <loc>http://pundaquit.republika.pl/</loc>

<url>
    <loc>http://pundaquit.republika.pl/index.html</loc>      
    <priority>0.6400</priority>

I think sitemap generator should recognize main webpage in a domain and produce only one <url></url> structure. Should I delete one of <url> </url> structure and which one? Does anyone know sites which explain this issue?

2 Answers 2

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Your http://pundaquit.republika.pl/ and http://pundaquit.republika.pl/index.html pages are considered two unique pages to search engines. To correct this you can set a canonical attribute in your index file and Google will recognize that .pl/ is your main domain.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

After this remove the index.html location from your sitemap and resubmit the sitemap to Google and Bing.

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  • OK. Thank You very much for ur precise advice. However what I notice so far, when I enter in Google Search: "site:pundaquit.republika.pl" index.html url is not doubled. I can see only one entry pundaquit.republika.pl/ which refers to index.html file.
    – Michal P.
    Mar 7, 2012 at 12:33
  • After adding 'link rel="canonical" href="pundaquit.republika.pl" ' element to the head section of my index.html site, xml-sitemaps.com sitemap generator produced the same sitemap refering to index.html url twice - ".../" n "/index.html". However as I can understand "/index.html" entry in sitemap should be deleted.
    – Michal P.
    Mar 7, 2012 at 12:46
  • I may be mistaking but the xml-sitemaps website may not account for the canonical attribute and simply generate a sitemap of every link it can find up to the 500 page limit. Yes I would delete the /index.html entry, and leave only http://pundaquit.republika.pl/ as the first entry. Viewing your sitemap though it says you have an error on line 130 which is the two << <image:caption>Capones Island<</image:caption>
    – Anagio
    Mar 7, 2012 at 13:00
  • OK. Thank U very much. When I'll generate more sitemap.xml in the future, I will always remove index file entry n leave .../ entry as I did in this situation. If in Google Search - site:"mywebsite" shows unique pages only, I think there is no need to use canonical element in index main file. Thank U for all help. :)
    – Michal P.
    Mar 7, 2012 at 21:40
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Since Google Webmaster Tools will give "duplicate URLs" warnings about http://example.com/ and http://example.com/index.html some tools like A1 Sitemap Generator defaults to consider it a duplicate and not include the latter URL. Anyhow, using canonical like suggested by others (or even better, a 301 HTTP permanent redirect) is the best solution.

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