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.
301 redirect (www.domain.com/index to www.domain.com)
-
Hello,
Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with:
www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com without creating an infinite loop.
Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ?
btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ?
thanks a lot !
-
Well, I would recommend you alter the internal links to just point to the new '/' default, but in the meantime...
I would have thought your code would have worked, but every time I try it my site falls over. It might work for you though. Give it a try but test it straight away
I'll see if I can get a different version working on my test site for you if not
-
seomoz tool is showing duplicate pages for those 3. Each of the version has at least 1 internal and even external links.
all 3 respond in the browser with the same layout/page
-
Hmm, maybe, I doubt the index.php is doing anything as if there's a index.html and index.php the .html takes precedence.
Check what's in the .php file, might be easier just to delete it.
-
Can I use a code like this ? (i've added one entry for index.php as it looks like the site has both an index.html and an index.php)
Barry Smith
Journeyman264 mozpoints
6 helpful answers
1 SEOmoz endorsed answers|
Helpful Answer | Barry Smith, Head of SEO at Gaming Media Marketing | about 2 hours ago |
Probably the simplest way to redirect the non-www to the www is to put this in your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
Thanks mate !
More then helpful.
-
Yeah, if it doesn't work you'll probably be faced with a blank page or you may get a 500 server error or maybe a 310. It should be obvious pretty fast
-
how it will behave if the redirect is not correct ? It will be visible ? (like a never-ending refresh of the main page)
-
I agree with Barry, but watch out for that last snippet. I've got caught when hosting companies redirect on their side. So test before walking away for more coffee : )
-
The last part redirects index.html to /
There would only be a loop if you redirected / to index.html
99.9% sure this'll work for you
I'm using the exact code on a small site right now and it's working fine
-
is the last part safe ? as far as the infinite loop things that some are afraid of..
-
Probably the simplest way to redirect the non-www to the www is to put this in your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]For reference the .htaccess file goes in the root of your domain via whatever file transfer program you use and of course replace example.com with your domain
If you get stuck, let me know
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
-
The particular page cannot be indexed by Google
Hello, Smart People!
On-Page Optimization | | Viktoriia1805
We need help solving the problem with Google indexing.
All pages of our website are crawled and indexed. All pages, including those mentioned, meet Google requirements and can be indexed. However, only this page is still not indexed.
Robots.txt is not blocking it.
We do not have a tag "nofollow"
We have it in the sitemap file.
We have internal links for this page from indexed pages.
We requested indexing many times, and it is still grey.
The page was established one year ago.
We are open to any suggestions or guidance you may have. What else can we do to expedite the indexing process?1 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Snippet showing as domain name with apostrophe, instead of page title when searching for the domain name.
Hi, We have an issue with one of our websites, with the snippet dispaying differently in Google serps when searching for the domain or the website name rather than a search term. When searching for a search term, the page title shows as expected, but when searching for the site by the domain name either with or without the tld, it shows the snippet as the domain name with an apostrophe at the end. Domain is subli.co.uk Thanks in advance for any advice!
On-Page Optimization | | K3v1n0 -
After HTTPS upgrade, should I change all internal links, or a general 301 redirect is better?
I recently upgraded to https. Of course most internal links of my old posts are still http. So I set up a 301 redirect in order to make the old link works. In terms od SEO this is good or it is better to update all the internal links to https, manually? In that case can I do it in batch with a search/replace command in the phmyadmin database? any other suggested method? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | micvitale0 -
Disappearing and reappearing in google index
Hello. I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages. They probably weren't as unique as they should have been. Suddenly, they all disappeared from the rankings and I freaked out. Then, two days later, they all returned. Is this a bad sign? Should I be worried? Why would they drop out of the rankings and come back in? Let me know, thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | RafeTLouis0 -
How long should I leave an existing web page up after a 301 redirect?
I've been reading through a few of blog posts here on moz and can't seem to find the answer to these two questions: How long should I leave an existing page up after a 301 redirect? The page old page is no longer needed but has pretty high page authority. If I take the old page down—the one that I'm redirecting from—immediately after I set up the 301 redirect, will link juice still be passed to the new page? My second question is, right now, on my index.html page I have both a 301 redirect and a rel canonical tag in the head. They were both put in place to redirect and pass link equity respectively. I did this a couple years back after someone recommended that I do both just to be safe, but from what I've gathered reading the articles here on moz is that your supposed to pick one or the other depending on whether or not it's permanent. Should I remove the rel conanical tag or would it be better to just leave it be?
On-Page Optimization | | ScottMcPherson0 -
301 redirect and then keywords in URL
Hi, Matt Cutts says that 301 redirects, including the ones on internal pages, causes the loss of a little bit of link juice. But also, I know that keywords in the URL are very important. On our site, we've got unoptimized URLs (few keywords) in the internal pages. Is it worth doing a 301 redirect in order to optimize the URLs for each main page. 301 redirects are the only way we can do it on our premade cart For example (just an example) say our main (1 of the 4) keywords for the page is "brown shoes". I'm wondering if I should redirect something like shoes.com/shoecolors.html to shoes.com/brown-shoes.html In other words, with the loss of juice would we come out ahead? In what instances would we come out ahead?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Www1 and www domain
hi, I have a client who has an e-commerce business. My client does not want to fill the pages with too much content and has set up a www1 version with the same domain-name as the www. The plan is to create a lot of content and push www1 in ranking and then sending users (via links) to the www for ordering. Although there will be no duplicate content published on www and www1 this seems like an odd strategy, especially since the www already has a good page rank, and I'm not sure about how engines view a www.domain.com and www1domain.com situation even with unique content in each. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | vibelingo0