undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • MozCon
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
    Moz Pro

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

    Try it free!
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Redirecting index.html to the root

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.

Redirecting index.html to the root

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
8
11
48.7k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • romanbond
    romanbond last edited by May 16, 2013, 4:17 PM

    Hi, I was wondering if there is a safe way to consolidate link juice on a single version of a home page. I find incoming links to my site that link to both mysite.com/ and mysite.com/index.html. I've decided to go with mysite.com/ as my main and only URL for the site and now I'd like to transfer all link juice from mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com/
    When i tried 301 redirect from index.html to the root it created an indefinite loop, of course.

    I know I can use a RewriteRule.., but will it transfer the juice??

    Please help!

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 7
    • Nikos-Kor
      Nikos-Kor @StreamlineMetrics last edited by Sep 27, 2021, 9:27 PM

      @streamlinemetrics this worked for my site Finbit Solutions, too! Thank you very much!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • topic:timeago_earlier,about a year
      • salena580
        salena580 @StreamlineMetrics last edited by Aug 23, 2020, 5:27 PM Aug 23, 2020, 5:27 PM

        It works good for my site https://uaedesertsafari.com/

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • topic:timeago_earlier,2 years
        • wideangle
          wideangle @StreamlineMetrics last edited by Aug 14, 2018, 11:34 AM Aug 14, 2018, 11:34 AM

          works, thank you!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • topic:timeago_earlier,4 years
          • almusammem
            almusammem @StreamlineMetrics last edited by Dec 22, 2014, 9:17 PM Dec 22, 2014, 9:17 PM

            Thank you very much, this works fine with me.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • webfeatus
              webfeatus last edited by Dec 17, 2014, 1:43 AM Dec 17, 2014, 1:43 AM

              Google may see this as a 301 but MOZ crawl does not seem to.
              Can you please help explain this?

              I am looking for a good .htaccess code for this redirect.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • topic:timeago_earlier,about a year
              • enxaqueca
                enxaqueca last edited by Oct 12, 2013, 9:55 PM Oct 12, 2013, 9:55 PM

                Thank you, Streamline Metrics. I looked everywhere and tried several different edits in my htaccess for a 301 redirect from index.html to root, but none worked. Your code worked wonderfully.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • topic:timeago_earlier,5 months
                • romanbond
                  romanbond @StreamlineMetrics last edited by May 16, 2013, 6:22 PM May 16, 2013, 6:22 PM

                  that seems to be working well. thanks a lot for your help.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • StreamlineMetrics
                    StreamlineMetrics @romanbond last edited by May 16, 2013, 7:20 PM May 16, 2013, 4:49 PM

                    If you want to redirect all index.html(s) to their roots, then try this code -

                    RewriteEngine On
                    RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
                    RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

                    And yes, Google will treat them as 301 redirects so your juice will be transferred and consolidated.

                    romanbond almusammem wideangle salena580 Nikos-Kor 5 Replies Last reply Sep 27, 2021, 9:27 PM Reply Quote 6
                    • romanbond
                      romanbond @StreamlineMetrics last edited by May 16, 2013, 4:35 PM May 16, 2013, 4:35 PM

                      thanks, that was quick!
                      A couple of questions before i go ahead and implement it:

                      will this rule re-direct all index.html(s) to their appropriate roots or will it work just for the home page?
                      Also, as far as user's expirience is concerned this will take care of redirecting requests to show index.html to the root, but what about the juice transfer. Will Google treat it as 301?

                      StreamlineMetrics 1 Reply Last reply May 16, 2013, 4:49 PM Reply Quote 4
                      • StreamlineMetrics
                        StreamlineMetrics last edited by May 16, 2013, 4:22 PM May 16, 2013, 4:22 PM

                        It's definitely a good idea to 301 redirect index.html to your root to consolidate link juice. I am assuming you have an .htaccess file so the following lines should work -

                        RewriteEngine On
                        RewriteBase /

                        redirect html pages to the root domain

                        RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [NC,R,L]

                        romanbond 1 Reply Last reply May 16, 2013, 4:35 PM Reply Quote 6
                        • 1 / 1
                        1 out of 11
                        • First post
                          1/11
                          Last post

                        Got a burning SEO question?

                        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                        Start my free trial


                        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.

                        • See all categories

                        Related Questions

                        • Kahuna_Charles

                          Someone redirected his website to ours

                          Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content  but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us?  Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 24, 2019, 11:18 AM | Kahuna_Charles
                          1
                        • gozmoz

                          Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com

                          I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
                          Page Authority 40
                          Linking Root Domains 31
                          External Link Count 138
                          Internal Link Count 18
                          Status Code 200
                          1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
                          Page Authority 19
                          Linking Root Domains 1
                          External Link Count 0
                          Internal Link Count 15
                          Status Code 200
                          1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
                          To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
                          Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
                          Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
                          or
                          Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
                          Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 23, 2017, 12:19 PM | gozmoz
                          0
                        • Sayers

                          Googlebot being redirected but not users?

                          Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 13, 2017, 5:55 AM | Sayers
                          0
                        • BrandBuilder

                          New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?

                          We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 18, 2015, 7:48 PM | BrandBuilder
                          0
                        • friendoffood

                          Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?

                          Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on?  How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine.  This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google  Yet, no cache.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 30, 2015, 12:55 PM | friendoffood
                          2
                        • EndeR-

                          No-index pages with duplicate content?

                          Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 30, 2014, 4:18 PM | EndeR-
                          0
                        • SCW

                          Redirect at Registrar or Server

                          Hi folks, I have run into a situation were a new client has 3 TLDs (e.g. mycompany.com, mycompany.org and mycompany.biz), all with the same content. They are on a Windows IIS environment, which I am not familiar with. Until now, all of my clients have been Linux/Apache environment, so I always dealt with these issues utilizing htaccess. Currently all resolve to the same IP, but the URL remains the same in the browser address field (e.g. if you type-in mycompany.org - it remains as such). We want the .org and .biz version to 301 Redirect to the .com TLD. I am wondering what the best practice might be in this situation? Could we simply redirect at the registrar level or would implementation at the server level be best? If so, I would really appreciate an example from someone with experience implementing redirects on IIS. Thank you!

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 19, 2013, 1:00 PM | SCW
                          0
                        • Lakshdeep

                          XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index

                          We have a similar problem to http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-a-xml-sitemap-index-point-to-other-sitemaps-indexes Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes? According to the "Unique Doll Clothing" example on this link, it seems possible http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic Can someone share an XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index example? We are looking for the format to implement the same on our website.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 11, 2013, 6:03 AM | Lakshdeep
                          0

                        Get started with Moz Pro!

                        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                        Start my free trial
                        Products
                        • Moz Pro
                        • Moz Local
                        • Moz API
                        • Moz Data
                        • STAT
                        • Product Updates
                        Moz Solutions
                        • SMB Solutions
                        • Agency Solutions
                        • Enterprise Solutions
                        • Digital Marketers
                        Free SEO Tools
                        • Domain Authority Checker
                        • Link Explorer
                        • Keyword Explorer
                        • Competitive Research
                        • Brand Authority Checker
                        • Local Citation Checker
                        • MozBar Extension
                        • MozCast
                        Resources
                        • Blog
                        • SEO Learning Center
                        • Help Hub
                        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                        • How-to Guides
                        • Moz Academy
                        • API Docs
                        About Moz
                        • About
                        • Team
                        • Careers
                        • Contact
                        Why Moz
                        • Case Studies
                        • Testimonials
                        Get Involved
                        • Become an Affiliate
                        • MozCon
                        • Webinars
                        • Practical Marketer Series
                        • MozPod
                        Connect with us

                        Contact the Help team

                        Join our newsletter
                        Moz logo
                        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                        • Accessibility
                        • Terms of Use
                        • Privacy

                        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.