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.
Linking to root domain or index page
-
While link building, should I link to index page of my website i.e www.mydomainname.com/index.html or should I link to root domain i.e www.mydomainname,com
Also I see duplicate title error for index page and root domain in error statistic. How can I get rid of this.
-
Hi Arti,
Generally, you want to link to your root domain. Many common website templates link to home as /index.html, but that really hasn't been necessary for years.
The easiest way to fix this would be to add a canonical tag in your homepage, which is the /index.html file. It would go in the section and look like this:
After you add this, when you look at your source code for your homepage, you should see this tag in there from whatever address you reached the page from.
There's a lot of information on duplicate content out there, and a lot of different ways to fix the same problem. Here's a good overview of the subject:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
Best of luck with your SEO.
-
To me, that's not what your 404 page is for. I wouldn't recommend doing it. What happens if they typo something, or hit a bad link some other way? There's no message to tell them what happened and it creates a confusing user experience.
Better, in my opinion, to redirect the file individually
Arti, there's a good article on SEOmoz about redirects. Down the bottom, there are some how-to guides on how to do things like 301's. Just be careful of infinite loops if you're using apache.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work
-
Hi Anthony, Thanks for your reply. Does that mean that I should actually remove index.html from my website. Also please help me for 301 redirect. Rgds Arti
-
If you have wordpress you can add
<code>php header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: ".get_bloginfo('url')); exit(); ?></code>
<code>to your 404 page.</code>
-
Hi Arti,
You'll just need to create a 301 redirect from www.yoursite.com/index.html to www. yoursite.com. This will permanently eliminate the /index.html version (which is a duplicate page) and fix the duplicate content error.
After that, build links to www.yoursite.com.
Hope this help. If you need more info on how to do the 301 redirect just 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
-
Root-Domain vs Subdomain Linkbuilding
Hello Mozzers! Couple of days ago I received a request to start optimizing a wordpress website, the domain itself has been around for around 10-12 years so it's it can be considered as one that has real history behind it. The page has been moved from HTML/FLASH to wordpress about 3 - 4 years ago and hasn't been any SEO maintenance on it. The site used to rank for first position with several keywords, but now understandably, it has greatly decreased. My main question would be, that when I've checked the root domain's and the subdomain's metrics with MOZ Open Site Explorer, the sub domain (with "www.") showed a PA 40 and 90 external links while the root domain (without "www.") only has 27 PA and 6 External links. I know that the 301 or server redirects only transfers about 90% of the link juice to the targeted URL but the difference between the 2 results seem way too big for me. What do you think? Is this normal?
Link Building | | adamdankhazi
During future link building is it more beneficial to target the root domain so the page won't lose that "10%" by redirecting the new link from sub-domain to root domain?
Is it possible to get more juice transferred? Thank you very much,
Adam0 -
Best way to structure a service area page with many locations to maximize internal links to them?
Currently our service area page (http://www.njlimocarservice.com/services.html) very sloppily lists many of the towns we serve in multiple counties - over 50 approx (scroll down). They have been placed that way so there is links to them from one of the subpages directly linked from the root domain. I am now attempting to make it pretty and organized with my designer. I intend to maintain a link to each individual town/landing page for SEO purposes to keep it close to root domain. My questions is how to best structure this. I don't want to list by county because some people don't know what county the town is in. However an alphabetical list may be overkill as there is so many. The other option is to get a search form or dropdown list on there but how will my landing pages be recognized by crawlers if there is no internal links from my root domain? Eventually we plan to expand further so what happens when we add 100+ landing pages? What will then happen to my internal link juice? Thanks!
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
Should I link from my blog back to my product pages?
Hello... I just installed a blog on my Magento site. My question is whether or not i should be linking within posts on the blog back to the product or category pages that i am talking about...from an SEO perspective. If in my post i am talking about flashlights being important when preparing for a storm, should i link the word flashlights to the flashlight category on my site? I know I can do this, the question is should i, from google's perspective. A) should i link the word (flashlights) to that category on my page B) should i put a line at the bottom of every post that says something like "if you are interested in purchasing flashlights, visit this link" and hyperlink that whole sentence... THANKS!
Link Building | | Prime850 -
Helpful or Hurtfull / Distributor Links to Our site on every product page?
We have a distributor site with a page rank of 3 on its home page, and 0-1'ish on its product pages. While our manufacturing site is PR 4 getting close to 5... We are thinking about adding a link from our distributors product pages to our manufacturing appropriate material information page. This would be about 10k links spread out among 7 materials. We want to add these links to help our distributor sites customers, but we don't want to hurt our manufacturing site in the process. I personally don't know of any problem this would cause, but our manufacturing site is so important I need to verify adding this many links wouldn't hurt us. Your thoughts and knowledge is appreciated.
Link Building | | donford0 -
Should I 301 Redirect The index.html Page?
Hello, As an experiment I am trying to work with an SBI site but am noticing index.html is being forced on me as the homepage. As I understand it's good practice to 301 redirect the index.html page to the to the actual home page. Can someone please confirm that I am right in thinking this? Here is an example: http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/index.html
Link Building | | umtmedia
http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/ According to yahoo 773 links are pointing to the index.html page and 771 links are pointing to the / page. I'm sure Google knows that these are the same pages and does not consider them as duplicate but surely the index.html page should be redirected right? am I going mad here? Now if we look at this site: http://www.jugglenow.com the homepage has 198 links according to yahoo
http://www.jugglenow.com/index.html this page also has 198 links? now I am confused, are these 2 the same page? On this page: http://www.jugglenow.com/juggling-balls.html notice how there is no link to the actual homepage but there is a link to the index.html page. Am I missing something here because I can't figure it out, surely there should be just 1 homepage without a index.html page. Any help would be appreciated0 -
Do links within imbeddable widgets carry link juice?
I'm dipping my toes into infographic design. On of my desired outcomes is to gain links by having other sites embed my graphic. I'm considering using Tableau's interactive data visualization software to do so; thus creating a widget, embedding it on my blog, and including the embed code for others to post. Is it possible to include a juice passing link in such an infographic? I know its possible to include links inside the tableau graphic but not sure if they have straight SEO value. If these links are not juice passing would it be better to go with a simple image link that passes value?
Link Building | | JesseCWalker1 -
Can link juice be passed in an iframe from domain A to domain B
Need to give our web partners our booking form which must be loaded in an iframe calling back to our domain. Is it possible to pass any link juice from their domain loading our iframe back to us. Was thinking of a "Powered by" text link in the form footer, but I'm guessing the link needs to be outside the iframe. Would love to hear any thoughts or workarounds on this.
Link Building | | apolloseo1 -
Backlink booster - boosts and helps to index links?
Hello all, We are using a tool called backlink booster that works in the following way: you view a page with a backlink to your site click on a boost link saved in favourites the link is pinged to rss directories and web 2.0 sites The idea is to get your links indexed faster. Has anyone used this or something like this and had any benefit from it? Thanks Shehzad.
Link Building | | Gareth_Cartman0