Hi, Thanks for taking a look. I wanted to ask you Digital Pointers if my web designer knows what he's talking about. I recently watched the video from Matt Cutts talking about the canonical link element here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM . The main part of it that I'm interested in is the duplicate content of the home page. The website I work for has www and non www version which go to the same page but they don't redirect to a preferred version. In addition I also have a www.example.com/index.php and a non www example.com/index.php. According to the video the search engines could have a problem with this. Not only this but on EVERY page of our website we link to www.example.com and www.example.com/index.php - both show the same page! Also www.example.com has a PageRank of 2, yet www.example.com/index.php has a PageRank of 1! Duplicate content in action? My web designer says it doesn't make any difference whether we redirect or not. And he says you can't redirect from www.example.com/index.php to www.example.com because it'll create an infinite loop. Do you think my web designer is right? And do you think he knows what he's doing in terms of SEO? I've used example.com as an example obviously. If you're interested in looking at the site to give me your opinion PM me - I'd be very grateful. Sorry for the long post.
Redirection is very important in such cases. Google will take this as Duplicate content for sure and you will get problems in optimizing your site. It is very easy to redirect. You just need to modify your .htaccess file and add a redirection code. Infinite Loop ???? What's that? You can now decide it by your self.
I agree with Stephen and your web designer sounds like a muppet, however: I think (i may be wrong) that .htaccess can redirect non www to www but index.php only appears when you link to it. The root of your domain automatically redirects to index.*** The way to get round this is change any internal links to purely the domain, not /index.php
You are right. You must not have link to "/index.php" anywhere on your site to avoid this problem. But a redirect to root is good if ever such a link happened to exist. You can use this code for this:
"because it'll create an infinite loop." Ohh Noo not an Infinite Loop..!!! that would destroy the world as we know it...
No, he doesn't - "infinite loop" LOL I am using these redirects since years, since making every new site and there are no any "infinite loops", no black holes around, neither end of the world Actually the sites are doing very well. Simply choose your preferred version with or without WWW and redirect the other 3 to it - stephen082 already posted the code above. ...and also consider changing your designer as obviously he's not that much into the things.
Your web designer is an idiot... err.. doesn't seem to have a clue as to what he is talking about. And if he doesn't know about canonical URLs and redirects (the most basic thing that EVERYONE claiming to be an SEO should understand) then he likely knows very little else about SEO. All web designers CLAIM to know SEO when in fact 99.9% of them learn a few buzz words JUST because they know clients want to HEAR that they know SEO. Redirecting from www.example.com/index.php to www.example.com does NOT create a loop. Add the following to the end of your .htaccess in the root of your web and then hit www.example.com/index.php and see what happens: I just winged this on the fly so there could be a typo... but replace example.com w/ yourdomain.com and see what happens. PS: The above assumes that you want the canonical version of all of your URLs to be the www version. If you'd like the non-www version to be your canonical URL then use:
Your Web Designer is wrong. I think you should redirect your non www and index.php versions to the www. version as soon as you can.
Hello All, Thank you so much for your responses. It's been very eye-opening! I'd love to get some more votes (and comments if you like) so I can show my web designer Also everyone so far has said that the redirects should be done but nobody seems to have said how much of a difference it would make. Could it be significant?
Well, it can make a difference, or it won't at all. With a redirect, it will merge your separate non-www. backlinks to your www. backlinks. If one has a massive amount, or both do, then it will mater. If there is no huge difference, it won't. I would check your backlinks for both www.domainname.com and domainname.com to see if it will make a difference.
Real world experience accounts for something, right? I can tell you that out of the 100's of sites that I manage, this does not matter. I agree with your web designer. Understandably you have a point and if you want to err on the side of caution than it is imperative that you listen to everyone posting here. However, I do not think that it is critical. Meaning, you don't have to stop the world to make this change. I would think you would want to, but at the same time this does not fit the definition of mirroring whatsoever, there is not a different domain involved under a different server. In reviewing Google's guidelines, they are looking for folks trying to market alternative domains, with duplicate content. In this case, worse case scenario is that Google would index your domain first and URL second with duplicate content. I don't believe that you are looking at a significant penalty for this type of action, and actually if you are looking to obtain more real estate on the first page your web designer is somewhat creative. I know that I am new to the board and this comment will stir the pot. I expect many to disagree, I also know they are not professional SEO advisors (for the most part).
Well the infinite loop part is pretty darn funny. That said, fixing the canonical issue is the first thing I generally have to do out of the gate. Web designers don't really care about that stuff. I actually don't recall ever seeing that pose a duplicate content issue though. It is however, good practice. I largely agree with my colleague from Colorado above. Hi and welcome to the peanut gallery sir Nigel
Canonical, you assume that he is working on an Apache server. Still, on a windows server there is always ISAPI rewrite...
Thanks again, Here are the reasons I thought it would be important to do and possibly have an impact: - Matt Cutts from Google recommends doing it (see the link to his video in the original post). To heartlandenergycolorado: Matt actually lists different URLs of a home page when talking about duplicate content rather than the more well known kind of dup content on alternative domains. See 1 min 20secs into the video. - A recent article in the Telegraph (here in the UK) by an SEO spotted that the Queen's website had this issue. - Stupidly I have links going to both www and non www. Also, you can't help how people link to you. (To Destinyx3 backlinks to www are 1591 and to non www are 51) - The website I work for has different PageRank for the home page - PR 2 when you visit www.example.com but PR 1 when you visit www.example.com/index.php (these two addresses obviously present the same page with the same content). - On every single page of the website we link to www.example.com AND www.example.com/index.php. This is part of the template so I personally can't adjust it. This is most probably the reason for PR1 on /index.php and PR2 on the .com/. Now do you think it would make a difference?
I had reviewed the video before posting, and still I do not think will make a large difference for you. What I mean is, if you redirect or don't I don't believe you will be penalized from Google. I do think your webdesigner has a point with the infinite loop because there is already a redirect in place. When someone goes to www. example .com they are really being brought to "www. example. com/index.php or .html", so redirecting the index.php with a 301 might cause a redirect. If I were managing the site, I would definitely test the redirect to see. This might help clean up the duplicate URLs. Once again, leaving it alone should be fine and not result in any kind of penalty.
Hey, Thanks for your input. I have now ensured we don't link to www.example.com/index.php AND www.example.com on any page. I agree with shworth, stephen082 and heartlandenergycolorado on this. However I have put a 301 redirect in place for the non www version. To heartlandenergycolorado: Why do you think it won't make any difference? Thanks to all
Sorry for my late reply. I do not think it will make a difference as we have toyed with this same issue in the past and not seen or felt any consequences from this. Your original concern was one of duplicate content. I could only assume that you were concerned about the duplicate content because you thought you might be penalized by Google for this. Is that correct? If I am on the same page as you, then I do not think that this would be a big deal because you would really have to try and double index both pages with the same content to actually violate Google's guidelines. The duplicate content issue really comes into effect when a webmaster is trying to dominate the 1st page with the same content over and over again utilizing different URLs to do so. In this case, you are not attempting to do that so that is why I said it is a non-issue.
I just redirect my www to no www. It's always preferred it that way. & Yes, www.example.com/index.php is the same as www.example.com (unless you specified in your htaccess to use a different homepage, which obviously you're not coz you're redirecting your homepage to your homepage). If you redirect www.example.com/index.php to www.example.com, what happens is www.example.com will just redirect again to www.example.com, thus creating an infinite loop. Yes, your webdesigner knows what he's talking about. Besides, why are you trying to redirect your site's homepage to its homepage? Isn't that a little silly? The index after all is the default homepage of a website, Google will not confuse www.example.com/index.php between www.example.com as duplicate content, because www.example.com can ONLY be viewed if you have an index page (as I mention, it's the default homepage). Just trust your webdesigner & let him do his thing as apparently you are pretty clueless.