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.
Index.html vs. default.html
-
Hi,
I have a website that is about 7 years old. I had been using index.html as the home page. When I redesigned my site about 3 months ago I changed it to default.html. The old index.html page was still on my server. I just realized my mistake. All of my links to the home page lead to the new default.html.
However, people are still landing on the old index.html. I have change the old index.html to the new design but that means i have 2 "home" pages out there. Should i delete one? Should I leave them both there but use the canonical tag for one so it is not considered duplicate content?
What is best for my rankings?
-
Thank you.
If that was my site, I would redirect your /index.html and /default.html pages to http://www.normas9000.com/.
I would then update your canonical as well. Lastly, there is no reason to have both the default and index.html pages so I would remove one of them.
-
Thanks for your help, http://www.normas9000.com
-
Can you share your domain name? It would make this a bit easier with specific examples.
The question I have for you is, when I type in www.yourdomain.com, what is the URL that appears in the browser? Is that URL www.yourdomain.com? or www.yourdomain.com/index.html? Also, take a look and see is you have any ReWrite's happening in your htaccess file.
In short, I recommend you 301 www.yourdomain.com/default.html to www.yourdomain.com IF you have any links (internal or external) to the default.html file. You would only make this redirect if your home page actually is www.yourdomain.com. If it is actually www.yourdomain.com/index.html then you can use that instead.
It gets confusing speaking in general terms and trying to address all the possibilities.
-
I agree with Ryan. 301-redirects to mydomain.com would be the best solution since index.html is the default file on your web server and visitors prefer remembering mydomain.com in stead of mydomain.com/default.html. Besides, unless "default" is a keyword, "default.html" doesn't have any seo value. In fact, it's recommended to use folders in stead of file names.
You can change the default page in your web server's apache configuration however.
-
If I type in mydomain.com, it brings me to the index.html version of my home page. So, I can 301 the default.html version to go to index.html and then make all my internal links go to index.html
Am I understanding you correctly? Thanks!
-
I would recommend friendly URLs which avoids this entire issue.
More specifically, I am suggesting your home page URL be something like www.mydomain.com, not www.mydomain.com/index.html nor www.mydomain.com/default.html
Whatever you decide, the best solution would be to 301 your old home page(s) to your new home page. You would also want to update any internal site links to your current home page. If you have control or influence to update any external links, do that as well.
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
-
Website is not getting indexed
Hi,
Content Development | | Aman0022
Hope you all are doing great!
I have created a dog blog a few weeks back which talks about all things about dogs (http://pawspulse.com/). I am publishing couple of articles everyday which are more than 5k words long with proper keyword research but still Google is not indexing my content. My content is systematically categorized in proper categories related to dog guides, nutrition, accessories, dog breeds etc.
Can anyone help me how to get the website index faster fully. Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks0 -
"Get price" vs "Request a Quote"
I've read somewhere that "Request a Quote" can sometimes put people off a little bit and that Ill be better having "Get Price". Were an installation service company. I cna have a PRicing page were the customer can fill some information and be provided with a price on the website. Would this be a better option than having a request a quote page? Has anyone had any positive or negative experience with this strategy?
Content Development | | paulfoz16090 -
Blog.site.com vs site.com/blog
Which is better for SEO: blog.site.com or site.com/blog. In other words, is it better to have the blog running in a subdomain or as a director within the main site? Right now we are running as a subdomain, but want to be sure Google isn't considering that a separate site. The blog shows up separately on Google Analytics, which makes me think site.com/blog is better if for no other reason, it would give our domain greater traffic. Not sure if this matters, but some site info: our site is a sharing economy tool for renting your stuff we are running the blog on Wordpress blog traffic is about 5% of total traffic
Content Development | | TapGoods0 -
Shopify Blog vs Wordpress
We are moving our Ecommerce site to Shopify. Currently we run our blog on Wordpress and I'm wondering if anyone has an opinion on using the Shopify blog vs Wordpress?
Content Development | | Glaze0 -
In Index but not in Serps
Hi, I have a situation with a client site which is quite frustrating. Basically, most "recent" (by that I mean for the last couple of months) blog posts are failing to reach the SERPS (actually, one has and a couple have from the early days but it's taken months for them to arrive). Previously the blog posts were indexed very quickly - often instantly. Now, I've checked WMT etc and I've submitted each post manually but still nothing. The Sitemap is valid etc. However, pages (not blog posts) seem to be getting into the serps very quickly. Another complication is that if I search: site:www.domainname.com and set the date filter to a month I can see some of the earlier blog posts in that result set. However, if I scrape a bit of unique content from one of those posts and search - nothing in the SERPS. And my Moz report tells me that the page is not to be found in the top 50 either (so I'm confident these pages are not in the SERPS). Any ideas why this would happen to just blog posts? Is it something to do with the parent blog landing perhaps being too strong in the rankings? Any ideas appreciated. Thanks.
Content Development | | KMUK0 -
Moving a html site into Wordpress
I'm getting ready to move a site into Wordpress. The current or old site is built with static html pages. My question is, how should I handle Google with these old pages. Should I 301 redirect from each old page to the new? Or is there a better way to handle it?
Content Development | | brandco0 -
Services Page vs Page For Each Service Offered
Read an interesting article about how websites with just a "services" page suffer and they should try to create a meaningful page for each service they offer... Read so many blogs right now that I can't remember where I saw it
Content Development | | JamesFx0 -
Posts vs Pages and Rankings Differ Greatly
I use wordpress for most of my sites and generally have a post 'news' section. What I've noticed is that just about every time a post will always rank much higher and much faster than a 'page'. As long as I don't let it get buried in the news archives it continues to rank well, better than if I were to create a 'page'. Is there any sort of reason this might occur? I'd like to be able to just create 'pages' but at this point in time it makes no sense.
Content Development | | GYMSN0