Hi, I have a simple(?) problem. My Site can be reached by typing "www.mysite.com" which is PR-5. My site also has a page "www.mysite.com.index.php" which is PR-4. Now all the links in the site for home page refers to "mysite.com/index.php" - and when users log in they all go to /index.php? which is PR-3 My question is can I merge the two pages by re-direction then which one should i redirect Also, shall i change all the "home" links inside the site to simply "www.mysite.com" instead of "/index.php" which automatically takes visitors to /index.php Or do i redirect all mysite.com pages and other index pages to mysite.com/index.php I am really confused and require your guidelines to make the PR flow in the right direction. Thanks in advance for any help. Regards, JS
You should definately 301 permanent redirect www.site.com/index.php as well as http://site.com all to www.site.com Google sees these as 3 different pages, all containing duplicate content. It's called Canonical URL's and yes it also splits your PR between the three.
Many thanks Swiftfunny. Just one question - if i redirect all others to http://www.site.com/index.php will that help or reduce the PR. As site.com/index.php is now at PR4 while www.site.com is at a higher PR-5. Thanks, JS
No your better off 301 redirecting index.php to www.site.com Then any links pointing to site.com/index.php will automatically count as pointing to www.site.com with the redirect in place. Not to mention Google won't see it as multiple pages all with identical content.
Interesting sweet funny. Is ther any problem associated with 301 redirect, and do you know a good and easy step by step tutorial on how to do it?
There's no problem with it as long as your host supports .htaccess Step by step tutorial, ok paste this in to Notepad and save it as .htaccess and upload it to your root folder. Or add it to your .htaccess if you allready have one. Just change domain with your domain name, and the .com with your extension if applicable.
my suggest is using 301 redirect . redirect sitename.com/index.php to sitename. this also will help you to vaoid from supplemental resutls
Thanks Sweetfunny. I will implement it today. Thanks to Trichnosis also. Franck S - you can easily do that if you have access to Cpanel. Just use the redirect button and fill the two url's. Or you can use the code on Htaccess file in your root directory as given by seet funny. Regards, JS
Hi Sweetfunny, I tried to put your code in the .htaccess file. My hosting co tried also. But the site is going on a infinite loop! So we removed it. Also, it's not possible to chnage all the /index.php instances from the script of the site. My hosting co says it requires advanced redirection/rewrite code... can you help... I am confused... Regards, JS
Thank you for this everyone. I use to hear about 301 redirect, but I thought it was a black hat trick. Since my site is on Google first page for the keyword "affiliate marketing", I don't want to upset Google...
It's not black hat and it's actually recommended. Matt Cutts blogged about it and mentioned how Google see's http://domain.com , domain.com/index.html and the www.domain.com versions as seperate pages but all containing the same content ie duplicate. While i don't believe everything he says, i do believe this and have used it for years. Matts Article
It doesn't require advanced re-write rules, you can simply put a .htaccess in your subdirectories with a single rule to rewrite saying rewrite domain.com/subfolder/index.php to domain.com/subfolder Check out the .htaccess section here on DP as going in to specific rules is getting out of the scope of the SEO section. Nintendo is a whiz at this and has written an in depth sticky FAQ on .htaccess in that section. But give the following a try, i pasted some and wrote the last line by hand and appears a had two [L] commands which means Last line of the directive. But rewriting is something i recommend everyone does as part of their SEO strategy as it's largely the framework of your site.
Hi Sweetfunny, Many thanks for your help. I tried your code. The following code is now active and it works to redirect http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com But, the index part is not working and giving an error. Actually I am not a programmer and mod_rewrite is still a voodoo to me Lets see at the forum you suggested. Regards, JS.
I actually had this same problem. I don't think you make all the links /index.php but basically I went into my main file and edited the code to go to site.com not site.com/index.php using a redirect.
Ratman, I saw something similar in Nintendo's post... the infinite loop ... but my site is huge and acnnot change so much of coding JS
Well it is actually up to you. Do you want to change just the /index.php or all the pages such as index.php/contacts. And if you want to change all the other sub pages, I think you have a bit of mod rewrite on your hands.