welcome.html to index.html?

Hi,

I inherited a web site that uses welcome.html as the home page. Apparently the web host supports this file as the home page. I am going to transfer this site to another host which DOES NOT support welcome.html as the home page. I will have to change this file name into index.html.

My question is: do I need to do a permanent redirect to tell search engines that the home page is index.html now. I don't want to search engines to index 2 identical pages.

Thanks in advance!

 

Well, from my experience most websites would not register the index page to search engines, normally they will just submit the URL as http://www.sitename.com instead of the http://www.sitename.com/index.html or in your case, http://www.sitename.com/welcome.html .

Go to Google and enter 'site:www.sitename.com' and see if the 'www.sitename.com' appears or the 'www.sitename.com/welcome.html' .
If only the 'welcome.html' variant appears that maybe putting a redirect would be useful, if not, don't bother.

 

or you can just redirect welcome.html to index.html

or vise versa

 

How about just a plain ".com" or ".com/" depending on your initial preference when you started link building?

-D

 

Agreed. Unless the welcome.html page is ranking for all of your major keywords then there is no need to worry. But I would recommend that you at least do a 301 redirect to point all links to either www or no www this way you do not have to worry about which domain people link to.

 

If your new hosting supports .htaccess,you can set your homepage as welcome.html

 

i agree, u dont need to worry