Adding index.php at the end of the url effect it's rankings
-
I have just had my site updated and we have put index.php at the end of all the urls. Not long after the sites rankings dropped. Checking the backlinks, they all go to (example) http://www.website.com and not http://www.website.com/index.php. So could this change have effected rankings even though it redirects to the new url?
-
Lot's of good advice here, so I'll just weigh in with my two cents...
Instead of redirecting all your files to /index.php, why not rewrite those in .htaccess to redirect back to the original (without the /index.php)
This has the dual effect of preserving your link equity to those original urls, and there's a slight correlation between shorter URLs and higher rankings (in part possibly because shorter URLs have a higher click-thru rate)
Regardless, I suspect a perfect storm of factors contributed to your rankings, as you stated yourself:
1. Site was down when on old US host for a minimum of 3 hours one day and perhaps longer
2. Changed from US host to host based in Spain
3. Analytics stopped recording data for 3 days and site was down briefly after the change of host
4. All original URLs now have /index.php at the end
I purposely left out a Google Algorithm change, because of Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation is usually correct, and an algorythm change would be too much coincidence.
As Robert said, make sure you're targeting the right country in Google Webmaster. Other than that, I would try very hard to return all URLs, hosting and settings back to their original state before all these changes.
-
Hi Robert,
Thanks for your input on this.
The webmaster changed the hosting from US to Spain without my knowledge, the first I knew of it was when I saw the rankings drop and called him to see if there were any changes done to the site.
The site also seemed to be down at various times during the process and the analytics stopped recording data for 3 days.
We had excellent rankings in UK & US (both our target markets) but the day we changed host, the rankings all dropped from between 5 to 30 positions and so far are showing no real sign of returing to their original rankings even though we have now changed to a new US host.
I don't know if you have ever had the same experience but I wonder how much of an impact this will have in the long run for the rankings and will they even return without having to significantly promote the site again.
There are a number of factors which took place over this period:
1. Site was down when on old US host for a minimum of 3 hours one day and perhaps longer
2. Changed from US host to host based in Spain
3. Analytics stopped recording data for 3 days and site was down briefly after the change of host
4. New Google algorithm change
5. All original URLs now have /index.php at the end
Can it be a combination of all these factors or is there one main culprit?
I will speak with our webmaster Monday and ensure that he has set the target language to EN-US but we are also targeting the UK market and prior to this we were ranked very well in both countries.
Again, thanks for all your feedback!
-
Authority, You just named the issue. Changed from US to Europe. I am assuming the site is in English, what country are you targeting?
If US, and you changed to Europe, you would have had to go into GWMT and change language settings to EN-US. As a .com is not a ccTLD, and a server residing in Europe will be presumed to be targeting there, if you are not set up with GWMT as EN-US, your rankings will drop for a US search.
So, now, no matter what you are targeting, go into GWMT and go to site config, settings, language and choose the correct language config. Even if you are US and you are hosted in US, I urge you to insure this is done.
LMK
-
Thanks all for you input!
We have done redirected the old urls to the new ones ie from www.site.com/keyword/ - to - www.site.com/keyword/index.php
We changed host on the 5th Feb. and literally the same day all rankings dropped. I know there have been recent Google updates but finding the real cause of this is still difficult. If there were no changes to the site, then I may have leant more towards a google algorithm update but the rankings dropped as soon as the sites hosting was changed from US to Europe. Hosting has since been changed back to US based.... 3 days on though and no significant improvements although some keywords are moving up 5 places or so.
Any more input appreciated
-
Authority
This may be implied or I may be missing something, but as to your links and 301's, if you are saying you did a single 301 of http://www.website.com to http://www.website.com/index.php then your rankings drop is because of that. For each url with links, you need to do the redirect of .com/url-a, url-b, etc. to .com/url-a/index.php, .com/url-b to .com/url-b/index.php, and so forth. This should be done in the .htaccess file. You will not transfer link juice by tranferring domain to domain, etc. You must do it url to url.
Hope it helps.
-
You say you have put index.php at the end of all the URLs? So each page is in it's own directory?
Harald is 100% correct but I am wondering; did you always have each page in it's own directory or was that part of the recent change? If the file names used to be more SEO friendly (i.e. keywords in the file name) and now they are just named index.php then that could have a lot to do with your rankings dropping.
Just wanted to add that, cheers.
-
Hi Authority Sitebuilder, First of all Google doesn't seem to care about these but for users' sake, for the sake of conformity and as a good practice, it is best to do a redirect
from(example)
to
http://www.website.com/index.php
In other words, select one URL and stick with it, redirect all others. Make a 301 redirect of your old URLs to your new URLs. Then it should not affect your ranking unless you will do some other changes on your pages As you said earlier that all the back links go to the http://www.website.com (old url), so it is better to redirects o the new url i.e http://www.website.com/index.php
I hope that your query had been solved.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results. Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination? I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB1 -
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
Why my site it's not being indexed?
Hello.... I got to tell that I feel like a newbie (I am, but know I feel like it)... We were working with a client until january this year, they kept going on their own until september that they contacted us again... Someone on the team that handled things while we were gone, updated it´s robots.txt file to Disallow everything... for maybe 3 weeks before we were back in.... Additionally they were working on a different subdomain, the new version of the site and of course the didn't block the robots on that one. So now the whole site it's been duplicated, even it´s content, the exact same pages exist on the suddomain that was public the same time the other one was blocked. We came in changes the robots.txt file on both server, resend all the sitemaps, sent our URL on google+... everything the book says... but the site it´s not getting indexed. It's been 5 weeks now and no response what so ever. We were highly positioned on several important keywords and now it's gone. I now you guys can help, any advice will be highly appreciated. thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Can adding backlinks to your video on youtube increase rank?
Hello, I know that adding many backlinks directly to your money site can be harmful as Google doesn't like it but I want to know that I have a video on each post of my website and my one friend told me that if you add backlinks to your video which is linked to your site than it may be helpful to increase your rankings. Is it true? Please let me know. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
Does Mobile optimised site improve ranking and how to index it faster?
Hi i have several question with regards to mobile optimised site: Does having a mobile optimised site improve ranking in SERP? How can we push/index mobile optimised sites to users searching on mobile sites faster? e.g. returning m.abc.com or abc.com/m to users seraching on mobile earlier.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FWSBIO0 -
Pagination Question: Google's 'rel=prev & rel=next' vs Javascript Re-fresh
We currently have all content on one URL and use # and Javascript refresh to paginate pages, and we are wondering if we transition to the Google's recommended pagination if we will see an improvement in traffic. Has anyone gone though a similar transition? What was the result? Did you see an improvement in traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How to deal with old, indexed hashbang URLs?
I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e. www.example.com/#!page-name-here). We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this: www.example.com/page-name-here Here's the problem: Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index. These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash. So, when the web server sees this URL www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact (www.example.com/#!page-name-here). Hopefully, that makes sense. So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/). My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage. Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage. Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no. And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months. Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries. So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs? Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #). I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way? If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue. Best, -G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Celts180 -
DCMI and Google's rich snippets
I haven't seen any consistent information regarding DCMI tags for organic SEO in a couple of years. Webmaster Tools obviously has a rich set of instructions for microdata. Has there been any updated testing on DCMI or information above the whisper/rumor stage on whether engines will be using Dublin? As a final point, would it be worth going back to static pages that haven't been touched in a couple of years and updating them with microdata? It seems a natural for retail sites and maybe some others, but what about content heavy pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyseo0