Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Should I Add Location to ALL of My Client's URLs?
Hi Mozzers, My first Moz post! Yay! I'm excited to join the squad 🙂 My client is a full service entertainment company serving the Washington DC Metro area (DC, MD & VA) and offers a host of services for those wishing to throw events/parties. Think DJs for weddings, cool photo booths, ballroom lighting etc. I'm wondering what the right URL structure should be. I've noticed that some of our competitors do put DC area keywords in their URLs, but with the moves of SERPs to focus a lot more on quality over keyword density, I'm wondering if we should focus on location based keywords in traditional areas on page (e.g. title tags, headers, metas, content etc) instead of having keywords in the URLs alongside the traditional areas I just mentioned. So, on every product related page should we do something like: example.com/weddings/planners-washington-dc-md-va
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdrama231
example.com/weddings/djs-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting-washington-dc-md-va OR example.com/weddings/planners
example.com/weddings/djs
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting In both cases, we'd put the necessary location based keywords in the proper places on-page. If we follow the location-in-URL tactic, we'd use DC area terms in all subsequent product page URLs as well. Essentially, every page outside of the home page would have a location in it. Thoughts? Thank you!!0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first. I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs. For example website.com/category/sub-category.html Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/ We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings. By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category? Second question: If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case. For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category Duplicate content/pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Is there any effect on ranking if i disable right click on page??
Hello , I have site, in which client needs right click on All his pages, his traffic is very Good, But worried, if right click hurts its traffic, ?? any expert can help ?? Thx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ieplnupur0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
What's the deal with significantLinks?
http://schema.org/significantLink Schema.org has a definition for "non-navigation links that are clicked on the most." Presumably this means something like the big green buttons on Moz's homepage. But does anyone know how they affect anything? In http://moz.com/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo#comment-142936, Jeremy Nelson says " It's quite possible that significant links will pass anchor text as well if a previous link to the page was set in navigation, effictively making obselete the first-link-counts rule, and I am interested in putting that to test." This is a pretty obscure comment but it's one of the only results I could find on the subject. Is this BS? I can't even make out what all of it is saying. So what's the deal with significantLinks and how can we use them to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NerdsOnCall0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1