Removing 301 redirect

tulip4heaven said: ↑

Hi,

few months ago I put a 301 redirect

http://www.domain.com to http://www.domain.com/index.php

Now I want to remove 301 redirect , Is there any effect on indexed pages and search engine raking .

Thanks
Usman
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If you do not add back another redirect... yes this could adversely affect rankings. It has to do with canonical URLs. By allowing your home page to be accessed multiple ways like:

http://example.com
http://example.com/index.php
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/index.php

you are introducing the likelihood of duplicate content issues and split page rank/link juice.

I posted several times about canonicalization issues, the problems they cause, and solutions in several threads. The following is an excerp from one of those recent posts:

Google and the other engines rank URLs. Every unique URL is considered by the search engines to be a different 'page' in their index. Most sites out there not professionally SEO'd have canonical issues because they are not aware of this fact.

Every 'page' on your site should have one and ONLY one URL. This is called the canonical URL or preferred URL.

For example,

http://example.com/
http://example.com/index.html
http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/index.html

might all be URLs for your home page. Google and the other engines see these as 4 different 'pages' because each has a different URL. This leads to a couple of problems that affect your rankings for particular keyword phrases - 1) duplicate content and 2) split page rank/link juice.

It leads to duplicate content because your site serves up the exact same content (your home page) under all 4 URLs. So one of the 4 URLs (you have no way of knowing which) gets flagged as the original version of the content and the other 3 get flagged as duplicate. For the 3 duplicate versions of the home page, all ranking factors that are based on the content of the page are devalued in the ranking algorithm.

Since Google sees them as 4 different pages, if they each have 10 inbound links from 10 different sites then what you have is 4 URLs with 10 inbound links each.

The way to fix this is to decide on some rules of how to determine which URL is the canonical or preferred URL. This usually means making decisions like:

- www vs non-www
- show trailing '/' when referencing folders w/ default documents or hide the trailing '/'
- show default document filename when referencing folders w/ default documents or hide the default document name
- if you support https as well then which pages should be https and which should be http (don't allow a single page to get indexed as both)

It doesn't matter which rules you decide on for constructing canonical URLs as long as you decide on the rules and enforce them across your site w/ 301 redirects. I always choose www, show trailing '/', and hide default document name. So my preferred canonical URL in the above example would be http://www.example.com/ but that is just my preference.

To fix the canonical issues you simply redirect all other non-canonical URLs to the canonical URL similar to the following:

http://example.com/ --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/
http://example.com/index.html --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/ Canonical URL No Redirect Required
http://www.example.com/index.html --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/

Now Google will give your canonical URL credit for all inbound links to the other 3 URLs as well as giving it credit for the link text used to link to the other 3 non-canonical URLs. This means the PR will be passed from the other 3 URLs to the canonical. The redirects also cause the other 3 URLs to drop out of the index.

So now Google sees your home page http://www.example.com/ as a single URL with 40 inbound links instead of 4 different URLs with 10 links each.

This eliminates duplicate content issues on your site and split page rank. Your home page will gain some PR because it's getting credit for 4 times as many inbound links and hopefully because of the additional links w/ relevant link text it will rank better for the terms other sites are using in the links. It now has 4 times as many link texts to be considered for keyword rankings in the SERPs and 4 times as many potentially relevant refering pages to be considered.

Hope that helps.
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Removing 301 redirect

tulip4heaven Well-Known Member

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Removing 301 redirect

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