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  4. Do I need to 301 redirect www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com/ ?

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Do I need to 301 redirect www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com/ ?

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  • Small_Business_SEO
    Small_Business_SEO last edited by Feb 7, 2015, 1:14 PM

    So, interestingly enough, the Moz crawler picked up my index.html file (homepage) and reported duplicate content, of course. But, Google hasn't seemed to index the www.domain.com/index.html version of my homepage, just the www.domain.com version. However, it looks like I do have links going specifically to www.domain.com/index.html and I want to make sure those are getting counted towards my overall domain strength.

    Is it necessary to 301 redirect in the scenario described above?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Yannis_s
      Yannis_s last edited by Jun 16, 2015, 7:36 AM Jun 16, 2015, 7:36 AM

      Hi,

      I tested the code mentioned above:

      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteBase /
      RewriteRule ^(.*)index.(html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

      It works well for index.php, but not for XX-index.php. The site where I tested this code is bilingual, so there is also a GR-index.php file and the above code redirects it to the root domain as well.

      Also, another problem is that the code above causes the redirection of index.php inside any directory. For example, http://domain.com/directory/index.php is redirected to http://domain.com/directory/

      How can I avoid this and keep only a "basic" redirection of http://domain.com/index.php to http://domain.com?

      Yannis

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • topic:timeago_earlier,4 months
      • MindlessWizard
        MindlessWizard last edited by Feb 8, 2015, 6:32 AM Feb 8, 2015, 6:32 AM

        I would recommend you to do that.  Homepage may have different versions  depending on the CMS you are using.

        index.htm index.html

        index.php

        So as @donford mentioned you can fix that with .htaccess

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • donford
          donford last edited by Feb 8, 2015, 12:14 AM Feb 8, 2015, 12:13 AM

          Yep,

          This code inside your .htaccess file should fix that.

          ``RewriteEngine On 
          RewriteBase /` RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.(html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]`
          
          Hope it helps,
          Don
          
          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • TheeDigital
            TheeDigital last edited by Feb 7, 2015, 1:23 PM Feb 7, 2015, 1:23 PM

            Yes, you will want to redirect it. Be careful though as a lot of times this isn't done correctly and creates a loop. There are multiple ways to do this including but not limited to DirectoryIndex or a RewriteRule

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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