Is it ok to point internal links to index.html home page rather than full www
-
I thought I saw this somewhere on SEOmoz before but I was so busy by the time I got around to work on my SEO on my site, I realized I have this happening and can't recall if it is a problem which takes away from my ranking.
If my www.website.com is ranking well but I have internal menu links pointing to www.website.com/index.html instead of www.website.com will that take away from my www.website.com rankings?
Should I change all my menu links that point to /index.html to the full website url path www.website.com ?
-
Awesome! By adding the following code to my .htaccess file, and placing it in my public directory it works. Didn't work from the root directory which I figured out later. I think related concerns are solved now. Now to see how the results show on the next crawl.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /index.html?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ "/$1" [NC,R=301,NE,L] -
Try this - of course take what you need from it - source is here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6059920/removing-index-html-from-url-and-adding-www-with-one-single-301-redirect Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(./)index.html$ [NC] RewriteRule . http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%1 [R=301,NE,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteRule . http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [NE,R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(./)index.html$ [NC] RewriteRule . %1 [R=301,NE,L]
-
Thanks. I was trying a mobile version of the website also at some point. I will just delete that one for now.
I can try your idea but is forwarding from the page itself still good for SEO?
-
Well, I tried taking out the 2nd instance of RewriteEngine on but i Just get a 500 error now. I put it back how it was for now.
Any other ideas?
-
could it not be working because you used rewriteengine twice?
-
The 301-redirect that Mark and Nakul discuss is probably your best bet here, but if that's causing you implementation problems, you could use the canonical tag on your home-page (in the section):
That will help sweep up any duplicates. It is best to link consistently to the root version, though (without the "index.htm"). FYI, you've got another weird duplicate in Google's index:
-
Thanks. Sorry I meant to say index.htm. Thanks you both for making this very clear. I've already created a .htaccess file to fix my twin domain issue, now I just have to modify the .htaccess file to include this code.
The code unfortunately doesn't seem to work when I upload it. meaning, when I type in my website address including index.htm the display still says index.htm rather than removing that part. Am I doing something wrong? Here's what I have currently in my htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www|blog|askdaniel).
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm?\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]
-
Hi Daniel,
I was a bit confused by this - index.html on your site returns a 404 error. I changed the url to index.htm and then it returns the correct information as a 200.
Basically, I'm not saying to delete the page index.htm - that is in fact your default page and what the server will show as your homepage. Nakul and I have just been saying to configure the server to strip out the index.htm from the URL and just show twinbytes.ca. Since your site is in fact on an Apache server, you should be able to use the htaccess info that Nakul gave you. But be careful when changing an htaccess file - you can really mess up your site if you don't do it properly. Be sure to make a backup of the file before making any changes or additions to it.
Even though your file is index.htm, the line in Nakul's code should have you covered due to the regular expression.
Mark
-
Thanks. You answered my main question. One other question then from that. How can I remove the index.html file from the website but still have the main website load? I believe the index.html file has to be located somewhere for the main page to know where to look. Right? I believe if you go to www.twinbytes.ca which is my website, it really looks at www.twinbytes.ca/index.html anyway to get the information to display. Would I be correct in saying so? I understand 90% of this, but this whole index.html for the home page thing is a bit confusing.
-
Yes, that's right. Thanks Mark for specifying that .htaccess will only work if you are Apache based.
-
Nakul didn't specify, but the code he gave you is if your site is running on an apache server. Make sure to work with your developers to deal with these issues, and don't try changing your htaccess file on your own - you make major problems for your site very easily.
-
Ideally, it's best not to have the index.html showing up as well - could be a problem of duplicate content. So I would recommend correcting your internal links to point to www.website.com without the index.html. Generally, you should set up the server so that it strips out the index.html and 301 redirects to the clean domain. However, if you need to keep the index.html live and can't redirect it, at the very least I'd make sure to use a canonical tag on the page pointing to the clean version of the page, www.website.com.
Let me know if you need me to elaborate further.
Mark
-
Yes, you definitely should and when you do that, make sure you do a redirect from www.website.com/index.html to www.website.com You could do that via .htaccess RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can i check which inbound links to my site go to 404 pages?
I have external links coming into my site going to 404 pages, but i cant seem to find a way to search all broken links pointed at my website.
On-Page Optimization | | NickJPearse0 -
What on-site issue could be causing Moz to not detect internal links?
Hey guys, We've done a crawl and none of our internal links are showing up. Are there any on-page factors that would prevent Moz from being able to detect our internal links? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Index Page Content
Mozers, I am of the believe and as a person who puts the utmost emphasis on the index page of any website I am trying to rank, especially with a new domain ... insuring content is relevant, structured, optimized and we have some link juice flowing in. I find once we get the index page ranked, Google's little bots then start to index and rank accordingly the rest of the website ... and we start producing results. We also develop websites (dare I say its where we expertise in) and unexpectantly the client has asked us to carry out SEO work additionally to their web development. Problem lies here, their index page, has absolutely no written content at all, just one large image with a logo (Fashion Website) ...Which I identify as a huge issue as per my explanation is paragraphs one or two. I am sure withe the many more qualified SEO experts and gurus within the SEOmoz community, you have also come across this issue So a few questions, if you don't mind adding advice. 1 - Am I putting too much emphasize on content within the index page, in terms of indexing and actually ranking ...yes I appreciate that terms within the website will be ranked against other pages other than the index page, but will it harm us for having no content at all within the index page 2 - If so, and yes is the answer to above, how do we handle it, we have spoke with the client and he is pretty adamant that he want the index page as is, he has been through out the whole website building process. As suggested, any advice would be really appreciated, its a difficult market to rank within a it is, and i can only see this index page making the task a lot more difficult Cheers John
On-Page Optimization | | Johnny4B0 -
Which pages on my site should I back link to
The majority of the back links I have been creating link directly to our home page and to the store page. Is this the best approach or should I be trying to spread the links throughout our site to include product categories and subcategories etc?
On-Page Optimization | | Hardley0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
If a page has more than 100 links, rather than splitting up the page into multiple pages, is it ok to use name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />? The page in question lists links to articles so the page itself isn't that important to appear in serps, but the articles are the helpful content pages: www.ides.com/articles/processing/injection-molding/
On-Page Optimization | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
3 Different Home Page URL's Being Indexed?
Hello Everyone! I own a dog supplies eCom site on the x-cart platform. I recently upgraded to 4.4 version about 3 weeks ago and am noticing 3 different home page URL's getting indexed and ranked: /
On-Page Optimization | | k9byron
/home.php
/home.php?cat= I dont know why this is happening and I dont claim to be an expert SEO but know this cant be good! I am seeing high rankings on certain terms for all 3 URL's. Has anyone seen this before and can anyone give me any feedback on this and how it may be effecting my sites ranking in the future? Thanks in advance!
Byron-0 -
Home Page is Not Ranking Anymore on this ecommerce site
Hi Everyone, I work regularly on this site www.cheapsnapframes.co.uk which is a cubecart based site and upto a few months ago the home page used to rank on poster frames we were on page 1 of google now we are on page 2 but it has dropped the home page and favours a category page. I have been looking at this to try and figure out why and I have today realised I had some external links on the home page pointing to the .com which the site used to run from but has been setup as a 301 redirect so I have changed these to internal links. I have used the on page tool and get an A but its been showing an A for a long time. Is there any other reason why we have lost out on this keyword term? Thank you in advance Tracy
On-Page Optimization | | dashesndots0 -
Nofollowed internal links from the home page
Hi, I'm conducting an on-page review for someone and have noticed something I've not seen before. Some of the major internal links from the home page are marked as no follow. For example: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>/customer-services" rel="nofollow">Customer Services This is on the top navigation bar and the content in this and all other sections are marked as no-follow but they should all be crawled. Is this an error or am I missing something? Any ideas guys? Thanks Bush
On-Page Optimization | | Bush_JSM1