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.
Homepage Index vs Home vs Default?
-
Should your home page be www.yoursite.com/index.htm or home.htm or default.htm on an apache server? Someone asked me this, and I have no idea. On our wordpress site, I have never even seen this come up, but according to my friend, every homepage HAS to be one of those three. So my question is which one is best for an apache server site AND does it actually have to be one of those three?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Thanks so much! I really appreciate the insight.
Ruben
-
If you want more information yes Apache server does make
Most Apache web servers have set the following pages as the default page with a directory.
default.htm default.html index.htm index.html index.php
If using WordPress you could see index.php because WordPress
Uses a PHP Database regardless of what your friend told you ideally you should have
Properly 301 redirected static links when talking about links that are going to be seen by Google.
this
Means WordPress websites ideally should not contain publicly visible index file of any kind.
To cut to the chase I have cited this response from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team. to Yoast
Referenced from http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/
I emailed Matt and asked whether it makes sense to add .html for systems like WordPress. His response:
In general I wouldn’t. My WP has urls like http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/remove-result/ and that’s pretty ideal.
So. Case closed.
Should I add .html to my permalink structure?
A good collection of resources. Are posted as links below this line.
Use Yoast http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
Is an excellent source of WordPress knowledge I strongly recommend using the Yoast WordPress seo tool the reason a side from being one of the very best Word press plug-ins that enhance your Word press site this one uses
http://yoast.com/change-wordpress-permalink-structure/
http://yoast.com/wp-content/permalink-helper.php
If you need to make changes to your link structure A great
resource I understand redirects is the link under this line
http://24ways.org/2013/url-rewriting-for-the-fearful/
If you need to redirect an index tag using Nginx
http://moz.com/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos
http://codex.wordpress.org/Linking_Posts_Pages_and_Categories
-
Merry Christmas,
Ruben
Your friend is speaking about a 100% HTML site and the answer is your site should not end using
www.yoursite.com/index.htm or home.htm or default.htm
Using Word press your site should end in www.yoursite.com or www.yoursite.com/
Some people when they ring there site over from an HTML static site to WordPress they might find a parma links
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
If you do this and 301 redirect any links that would be changed by using WordPress to the new Permalink structure shown below or if you feel like using one of the others which I recommend against you may. However most sites are best served using the settings below.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
On page vs Off page vs Technical SEO: Priority, easy to handle, easy to measure.
Hi community, I am just trying to figure out which can be priority in on page, off page and technical SEO. Which one you prefer to go first? Which one is easy to handle? Which one is easy to measure? Your opinions and suggestions please. Expecting more realistic answers rather than usual check list. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Log-in page ranking instead of homepage due to high traffic on login page! How to avoid?
Hi all, Our log-in page is ranking in SERP instead of homepage and some times both pages rank for the primary keyword we targeted. We have even dropped. I am looking for a solution for this. Three points here to consider is: Our log-in page is the most visited page and landing page on the website. Even there is the primary keyword in this page or not; same scenario continues Log-in page is the first link bots touch when they crawling any page of our website as log-in page is linked on top navigation menu If we move login page to sub-domain, will it works? I am worrying that we loose so much traffic to our website which will be taken away from log-in page sub domain Please guide with your valuable suggestions. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google Index
Hi all, I just submit my url and linked pages along with xml map to index. How long does it take google to index my new pages?
Algorithm Updates | | businessowner0 -
Wistia vs. YouTube
Hello, Mozzers! Sorry if I've missed a thread on this, but I didn't find anything after searching for a while... I've used Wistia for years - LOVE the service and the company! Had great luck getting Rich Snippets, ranked well... until the recent Google change. Now all of my Wistia thumbnails have disappeared (though my rankings have stayed strong, thank goodness!) M question is, does it make sense to now embed YouTube videos on our site, and to create a video sitemap with those pages, with the hope that Google will rank the page better than it otherwise would have, knowing that there is valuable (video) content on the page? This is new videos, I'm not thinking of replacing my Wistia videos at this time. I'll probably need to clarify as I see your responses, since this is a tricky set of interrelated decisions. Thanks for any thoughts that anyone may have! 🙂 ~ Scott
Algorithm Updates | | measurableROI1 -
How much link juice does a sites homepage pass to inner pages and influence inner page rankings?
Hi, I have a question regarding the power of internal links and how much link juice they pass, and how they influence search engine ranking positions. If we take the example of an ecommerce store that sells kites. Scenario 1 It can be assumed that it is easier for the kite ecommerce store to earn links to its homepage from writing great content on its blog, as any blogger that will link to the content will likely use the site name, and homepage as anchor text. So if we follow this through, then it can be assumed that there will eventually be a large number of high quality backlinks pointing to the sites homepage from various high authority blogs that love the content being posted on the sites blog. The question is how much link juice does this homepage pass to the category pages, and from the category pages then to the product pages, and what influence does this have on rankings? I ask because I have seen strong ecommerce sites with very strong DA or domain PR but with no backlinks to the product page/category page that are being ranked in the top 10 of search results often, for the respective category and product pages. It therefore leads me to assume that internal links must have a strong determiner on search rankings... Could it therefore also be assumed that a site with a PR of 5 and no links to a specific product page, would rank higher than a site with a PR of 1 but with 100 links pointing to the specific product page? Assuming they were both trying to rank for the same product keyword, and all other factors were equal. Ie. neither of them built spammy links or over optimised anchor text? Scenario 2 Does internal linking work both ways? Whereas in my above example I spoke about the homepage carrying link juice downward to the inner category and product pages. Can a powerful inner page carry link juice upward to category pages and then the homepage. For example, say the blogger who liked the kite stores blog content piece linked directly to the blog content piece from his site and the kite store blog content piece was hosted on www.xxxxxxx.com/blog/blogcontentpiece As authority links are being built to this blog content piece page from other bloggers linking to it, will it then pass link juice up to the main blog category page, and then the kite sites main homepage? And if there is a link with relevant anchor text as part of the blog content piece will this cause the link juice flowing upwards to be stronger? I know the above is quite winded, but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the power of internal linking on SERP's... Look forward to your replies on this....
Algorithm Updates | | sanj50500 -
Do search engines always pay heed to no index instructions?
Hi, I am currently working on a site that relies solely on it's images to attract traffic. My concern is that search engines will index our images, make them available through image searches and therefore allow our potential visitors to bypass our website completely. I know that there are a number of methods available such as disallowing images in robots.txt or using "noimageindex" tags in the HTML etc. but do search engines always pay attention to these requests? Does anyone have any experience with no indexing images? Or are there any methods that are guaranteed to work? Thanks in Advance.
Algorithm Updates | | BallyhooLtd0 -
Does google index non-public pages ie. members logged in page
hi, I was trying to locate resources on the topics regarding how much the google bot indexes in order to qualify a 'good' site on their engine. For example, our site has many pages that are associated with logged in users and not available to the public until they acquire a login username and password. Although those pages show up in google analytics, they should not be made public in the google index which is what happens. In light of Google trying to qualify a site according to how 'engaged' a user is on the site, I would feel that the activities on those member pages are very important. Can anyone offer suggestions on how Google treats those pages since we are planning to do further SEO optimization of those pages. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jumpdates0 -
Is a slash just as good as buying a country specific domain? .com/de vs .de
I guess this question comes in a few parts: 1. Would Google read a 2-letter country code that is after the domain name (after the slash) and recognize it as a location (targeting that country)? Or does is just read it as it would a word. eg. www.marketing.com/de for a microsite for the Germans www.marketing.com/fr for a microsite for the French Or would it read the de and fr as words (not locations) in the url. In which case, would it have worse SEO (as people would tend to search "marketing france" not "marketing fr")? 2. Which is better for SEO and rankings? Separate country specific domains: www.marketing.de and www.marketing.fr OR the use of subfolders in the url: www.marketing.com/de and www.marketing.com/fr
Algorithm Updates | | richardstrange0