I have a site where the default home page file name is "welcome.htm". So when someone keys in h**p://www.domain.com the server sends them to h**p://www.domain.com/welcome.htm. I would like to change this home page file name to h**p://www.domain.com/index.php. So when someone keys in h**p://www.domain.com the server will send them to h**p://www.domain.com/index.php. Currently pretty much everybody who links to me just uses h**p://www.domain.com, so anyone following those links would still arrive at my site even if I changed the home page file name. My question concerns backlinks to the domain. Are these backlinks attributed to the domain or to the actual landing page? If I make this change, will I lose (temporarily?) all the backlinks to my site? I'd appreciate any comments. Thank you.
In theory, your inbound links and anyone who bookmarked your site should be going to just the domain name. If anyone did bookmark or link to the page then those would be lost if you got rid of the old home page. I have seen sites where people had both and they still ranked well. You could keep the welcome.htm and also have the new page of index.php.
Thanks Web Gazelle. I was hoping that one of the advantages of having people link to the domain instead of an acutal homepage file name would be that you could change the underlying technology without losing backlinks. Thanks again.
That is why I make sure I submit just the domain name when I am submitting to directories and other places to get inbound links.
For your old welcome.htm page perhaps add to the <head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> You don't want both the welcome.htm page and your new index.php page being indexed as it would be duplicate content, you can then just add a meta refresh to the new page so you won't lose any traffic if you think its a concern. Also make sure your own internal pages all link back to www.domain.com as the homepage and not welcome.htm.