Hey everyone, I hope you can help me with a problem I came across today. I may have posted this in the wrong place so please move if necessary. I have two questions: 1. I'm working on editing title tags, etc., for a site and noticed that they have both site.org and site.org/home/default.asp indexed in the search engines. Their main domain is site.org, though if you were to type this address into your browser it then resolves to site.org/home. I checked the header on site.org and it shows a 200 http response header so it's not showing a redirect, but in the search engines it is being indexed as site.org, not site.org/home, so I don' think this is a problem. Using www in front of site.org in your browser also doesn't redirect to site.org, or site.org, but again, if I check the cache here it does show that Google has it cahced as site.org or site.org/home/default.asp. But the indexing of both site.org and site.org/home/default.asp is a problem. It has been awhile since I have seen this issue, would the proper solution here be to implement redirects? In this case, a 301 from site.org/home/default.asp, even maybe site.org/home, to site.org? Also, then make sure only link to site.org internally as well? 2. Second question would that other pages on the site have some problems as well. For example, site.org/solutions/default.asp is the URL of a page, and this is the URL that is indexed. However, if I use the www in front of this page (and others as well) in the browser, I get a "Your search - cache:http://www.site.org/solutions/default.asp - did not match any documents" error page on Google. Also, If I take out the default.asp part in the browser, and use www or no www, it does not resolve to the proper site.org/solutions/default.asp; it will stay as whichever version you typed into the browser, but if you look at the cache of either of those versions like I did above, you get the same error message. Would the solution here be just to redirect www to non-www in all cases including the home page just to be on the safe side and prevent and problems? Thanks for any guidance and sorry for the depth!
Hello, What you can do is to mask-redirect the site.org url to site.org/home/default.asp. You can do this without setting up a 301 redirection but a mod_rewrite (that's what it's called for Apache HTTP server at least). For IIS it's called ISAPIrewrite (http://www.isapirewrite.com/ .... there also might be others both paid and free). This makes your server display the contents of site.org/home/default.asp without changing (redirecting) the address to site.org/home/default.asp when the user lands on site.org Then what you'd have to do is make sure that search engines can't access directly site.org/home/default.asp, but only trough site.org. Also, it might be worth requesting a URL removal (using google webmaster's tools) for site.org/home/default.asp Hope this helps
Would this be an easier solution than the redirect? I was thinking that if I 301 redirect site.org/home/default.asp to site.org that that would essentially tell Google to get rid of site.org/home/default.asp from its index, by telling them that site.org is the destination? When the user lands on site.org, they are not redirected to site.org/home/default.asp, but rather site.org/home/. The client is linking internally to site.org/home/default.asp however and Google has indexed both versions, site.org/home/default.asp and site.org. I would like for someone to just land on site.org basically which is why I am thinking I would have to implement these redirects. I'm still a little fuzzy on question two though.......
i understand site.org/default.asp but why your site would come up under site.org/home/default.asp? do you have your site files under home folder which is within the main site folder? it appears that you have a home folder within the home/main folder for which you are having this issue. take a look at your site structure to see whether you have the site files under the main folder. for example, if you are using cPanel hosting, then your site files needs to be under public.html and not uneder public.html/home
@sultanofseo - I'm not sure as this is a client site and I don't have access to their files on their server. When you say main folder you mean the root folder of the domain correct, so site.org/? And then you are assuming that a home folder has been created which is the main folder which contains the main contents of the site? How would I go about eliminating site.org/home/default from the index and making sure that only site.org is indexed, and that all other versions (www) resolve to site.org? This is my question really.......redirects? Any help?