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URL Duplicity checker

Wygard generates every protocol, www, and trailing-slash variant of your URL and alerts you when they don't all funnel to one preferred address.

Scope Tier Default Alert
Site-wide Basic On — homepage by default 🔴 Danger

Why it matters

The same page is reachable at more variants than most people realise — http and https, with and without www, with and without a trailing slash. If those variants don't all redirect to one canonical address, search engines see several identical pages competing with each other, splitting ranking signals and diluting the authority that should sit on a single URL. It's a classic, silent duplicate-content leak that stems from an incomplete redirect or canonicalization config.

The default severity is Danger because the fix is at the infrastructure level and the damage — fragmented indexing of your most important page — compounds quietly over time.

What Wygard checks

For each monitored URL (the homepage by default; Advanced can extend to the full URL list), the crawler generates every plausible variant:

http://example.com          http://example.com/
http://www.example.com      http://www.example.com/
https://example.com/
https://www.example.com     https://www.example.com/

and confirms:

  1. Your declared preferred variant returns 200.
  2. Every other variant redirects with a 301 or 308 on every hop (not a temporary 302/307).
  3. Every alternate's final destination is the preferred variant.
  4. Total redirect hops stay ≤ 5.

A deviation fires an alert per offending variant, so you see exactly which address is misrouting.

Common alerts

  • Alternate doesn't redirect to the preferred variant — a variant returns 200 on its own, so it competes as a duplicate.
  • Wrong redirect type — a variant redirects with a temporary 302/307 instead of a permanent 301/308.
  • Wrong final destination — a variant redirects, but lands somewhere other than the preferred URL.
  • Redirect chain too long — a variant takes more than 5 hops to resolve.

Why the default is Danger

Duplicate host and protocol variants split your homepage's ranking signals across several URLs that should be one. There's no visible symptom — every variant loads — so the leak persists until rankings plateau. Danger severity surfaces it right after the crawl.

Responding to an alert

  1. Open the alert and check which variant misrouted and how.
  2. Fix the redirect rules at the server or CDN level so every non-preferred variant issues a single permanent redirect to the preferred URL.
  3. Confirm the preferred variant itself returns 200 and isn't caught in a redirect of its own.
  4. Re-run the test from the alert card to confirm every variant now funnels to one address.

Pair it with Canonical

URL Duplicity fixes duplication at the HTTP layer — one address, reached one way. The Canonical test covers the HTML layer — the page declaring which URL is authoritative. Belt and suspenders against duplicate content.