Index Page Redirect to Home Page? Best Practices...
-
Hi,
I am wondering what the best practice is when a site has an index page and a home page?
I have two pages, listed below, and want to know if I should 301 redirect my "index" page to my standard home page. The home page is where I would like all traffic to fall on for our website. Additionally, I used the rel=canonical tag years ago on the index page to indicate that the home page is the main content.
Home Page - https://www.1099pro.com/ (PA 45)
- Home Page Canonical: rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/>
Index Page - https://www.1099pro.com/index.asp (PA - 33)
- Index Page Canonical: rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/>
It seems to me that there is some extra juice that could be passed to my home page (which is the page that ranks highly for our major keywords) by 301 redirecting the index page. Is there any reason why I should not do that?
Really appreciate any help - especially with extra explanations - for the simple minded like me ;)!
-Michael
-
Hi Michael,
SEO Text book and best practices, if there are any, say that whenever there are multiple pages that serve the same content ,and you acknowledge that only one of them is critical: redirect other pages to the primary. Thinking like this: redirect /index.asp to the root page.
Just for the sake of clearing a little about the "there is some extra juice": Analyzing both pages through Moz's or any other private metric could lead you to wrong conclusions. Here, Moz creates its metrics with an algorithm taking into account links and some other magic. Here some information about Moz's Page Authority
Thinking like that, its perfectly normal that some other page gets more links and have different PA, even though being canonicals of each other. It also reinforces the idea that it should be redirected.On a side note, Google publicly said that doesn't use metrics like Moz's to rank a website/page. Just having a canonical is almost enough to transfer its authority.
Hope it helps.
Best luck
Gaston
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
-
What should I know about redirecting users based on cookies?
Hi Moz! My client wants to redirect users to a basic or professional version of their site based on cookies. What do we need to do/know to make sure implementation is SEO-friendly? What if a user has cookies turned off? Are there any other obstacles? Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | DA20130 -
Major home page change!
Hi Mozzers, Making a major homepage change on my site Orangeoctop.us. I am going from featuring content to featuring products, similar to how moz and hubspot feature their content on the homepage. Just to give you some numbers, the homepage only sees 2.6% of the total traffic and of that traffic half is direct. The homepage is going to be changed to OrangeOctop.us/guides. My Question: Is there anything that should be added to the homepage to ensure that I keep the same domain authority/page authority?
Web Design | | orangeoctop.us0 -
How to make sure category pages rank higher than product pages?
Hi, This question is E-Commerce related. We have product categories dividing products by color. Let's say we have the category 'blue toy cars' and a product called 'blue toy car racer', both of these could rank for the keyword 'blue toy car'. How do we make sure the category 'blue toy cars' ranks above the product 'blue toy car racer'? Or is the category page automatically ranked higher because of the higher page authority of that page? Alex
Web Design | | WebmasterAlex0 -
Writing A Data Extraction To Web Page Program
In my area, there are few different law enforcement agencies that post real time data on car accidents. One is http://www.flhsmv.gov/fhp/traffic/crs_h501.htm. They post the accidents by county, and then in the location heading, they add the intersection and the city. For most of these counties and cities, our website, http://www.kempruge.com/personal-injury/auto-and-car-accidents/ has city and county specific pages. I need to figure out a way to pull the information from the FHP site and other real time crash sites so that it will automatically post on our pages. For example, if there's an accident in Hillsborough County on I-275 in Tampa, I'd like to have that immediately post on our "Hillsborough county car accident attorney" page and our "Tampa car accident attorney" page. I want our pages to have something comparable to a stock ticker widget, but for car accidents specific to each pages location AND combines all the info from the various law enforcement agencies. Any thoughts on how to go about creating this? As always, thank you all for taking time out of your work to assist me with whatever information or ideas you have. I really appreciate it.
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
What is the best tool to view your page as Googlebot?
Our site was done with asp.net and a lot of scripting. I want to see what Google can see and what it can't. What is the best tool that duplicates Googlebot? I have found several but they seem old or inaccurate.
Web Design | | EcommerceSite0 -
Page Redirection solution
Page Redirection solution needs, there are 2 sites in the same folder and one page of old site is bxxxxxseo.com/products.php new site bxxxxxseo.com/product_list.php .there are many old page indexed i wanna redirect all old pages to relevant pages of new site using SEO friendly way .Any help really appropriate. Thank you
Web Design | | innofidelity0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Most of my pages have "Too Many On-Page Links". If you view the website you will see this is mainly down to the top navigation drop down menu: http://www.cwesolutions.co.uk So if I wanted to reduce the number of links I would have to have category links with landing pages. How much does having "Too Many On-Page Links" effect my website ranking? Is it really important and would I notice a difference if I changed it?
Web Design | | petewinter0 -
Indexing Dynamic Pages
Hi, I am having an issues among others, regarding indexing dynamic pages. Our website, www.me-by-melia, was just put live and I am concerned the bottom naviagtion pages (http://www.me-by-melia.com/#store, http://www.me-by-melia.com/#facebook, etc) will not be indexed and create duplicate pages. Also, when you open these pages in a new tab, it takes you to homepage. The website was created in HTML5. Please advise.
Web Design | | Melia0