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
-
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!
-
@streamlinemetrics this worked for my site Finbit Solutions, too! Thank you very much!
-
It works good for my site https://uaedesertsafari.com/
-
works, thank you!
-
Thank you very much, this works fine with me.
-
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.
-
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.
-
that seems to be working well. thanks a lot for your help.
-
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$ /$1/ [R=301,L]And yes, Google will treat them as 301 redirects so your juice will be transferred and consolidated.
-
thanks, that was quick!
A couple of questions before i go ahead and implement it:will this rule re-direct all index.html(s) to their appropriate roots or will it work just for the home page?
Also, as far as user's expirience is concerned this will take care of redirecting requests to show index.html to the root, but what about the juice transfer. Will Google treat it as 301? -
It's definitely a good idea to 301 redirect index.html to your root to consolidate link juice. I am assuming you have an .htaccess file so the following lines should work -
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /redirect html pages to the root domain
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [NC,R,L]
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
-
Geo-Redirect: good idea or not?
Hi Mozzers, The background: I have this very corporate .com domain which is used worldwide. Next to that, we have another .com domain which is specifically created for the US visitors. Within the organic rankings, we notice that our corporate domain is ranking much better in the US. Many visitors are arriving on this domain. As it is a corporate domain being used worldwide, they get lost. My questions: I know there are ways to redirect by location. Would it be smart to automatically redirect US visitors for the corporate domain to the commercial US-specific domain? Is it possible to only redirect US visitors and leave the website as it is for visitors from other countries. Won't this harm the corporate website (organically) worldwide? If this would be a good idea, any recommended plugins or concrete procedures? Thank you so much for helping me out!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Sander0 -
Multilingual Site and 301 redirection
Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Changing a url from .html to .com
Hello, I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Where to link to HTML Sitemap?
After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy290 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html. I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection. I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do: The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0 -
Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?
We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0