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.
Adding index.php at the end of the url effect it's rankings
-
I have just had my site updated and we have put index.php at the end of all the urls. Not long after the sites rankings dropped. Checking the backlinks, they all go to (example) http://www.website.com and not http://www.website.com/index.php. So could this change have effected rankings even though it redirects to the new url?
-
Lot's of good advice here, so I'll just weigh in with my two cents...
Instead of redirecting all your files to /index.php, why not rewrite those in .htaccess to redirect back to the original (without the /index.php)
This has the dual effect of preserving your link equity to those original urls, and there's a slight correlation between shorter URLs and higher rankings (in part possibly because shorter URLs have a higher click-thru rate)
Regardless, I suspect a perfect storm of factors contributed to your rankings, as you stated yourself:
1. Site was down when on old US host for a minimum of 3 hours one day and perhaps longer
2. Changed from US host to host based in Spain
3. Analytics stopped recording data for 3 days and site was down briefly after the change of host
4. All original URLs now have /index.php at the end
I purposely left out a Google Algorithm change, because of Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation is usually correct, and an algorythm change would be too much coincidence.
As Robert said, make sure you're targeting the right country in Google Webmaster. Other than that, I would try very hard to return all URLs, hosting and settings back to their original state before all these changes.
-
Hi Robert,
Thanks for your input on this.
The webmaster changed the hosting from US to Spain without my knowledge, the first I knew of it was when I saw the rankings drop and called him to see if there were any changes done to the site.
The site also seemed to be down at various times during the process and the analytics stopped recording data for 3 days.
We had excellent rankings in UK & US (both our target markets) but the day we changed host, the rankings all dropped from between 5 to 30 positions and so far are showing no real sign of returing to their original rankings even though we have now changed to a new US host.
I don't know if you have ever had the same experience but I wonder how much of an impact this will have in the long run for the rankings and will they even return without having to significantly promote the site again.
There are a number of factors which took place over this period:
1. Site was down when on old US host for a minimum of 3 hours one day and perhaps longer
2. Changed from US host to host based in Spain
3. Analytics stopped recording data for 3 days and site was down briefly after the change of host
4. New Google algorithm change
5. All original URLs now have /index.php at the end
Can it be a combination of all these factors or is there one main culprit?
I will speak with our webmaster Monday and ensure that he has set the target language to EN-US but we are also targeting the UK market and prior to this we were ranked very well in both countries.
Again, thanks for all your feedback!
-
Authority, You just named the issue. Changed from US to Europe. I am assuming the site is in English, what country are you targeting?
If US, and you changed to Europe, you would have had to go into GWMT and change language settings to EN-US. As a .com is not a ccTLD, and a server residing in Europe will be presumed to be targeting there, if you are not set up with GWMT as EN-US, your rankings will drop for a US search.
So, now, no matter what you are targeting, go into GWMT and go to site config, settings, language and choose the correct language config. Even if you are US and you are hosted in US, I urge you to insure this is done.
LMK
-
Thanks all for you input!
We have done redirected the old urls to the new ones ie from www.site.com/keyword/ - to - www.site.com/keyword/index.php
We changed host on the 5th Feb. and literally the same day all rankings dropped. I know there have been recent Google updates but finding the real cause of this is still difficult. If there were no changes to the site, then I may have leant more towards a google algorithm update but the rankings dropped as soon as the sites hosting was changed from US to Europe. Hosting has since been changed back to US based.... 3 days on though and no significant improvements although some keywords are moving up 5 places or so.
Any more input appreciated
-
Authority
This may be implied or I may be missing something, but as to your links and 301's, if you are saying you did a single 301 of http://www.website.com to http://www.website.com/index.php then your rankings drop is because of that. For each url with links, you need to do the redirect of .com/url-a, url-b, etc. to .com/url-a/index.php, .com/url-b to .com/url-b/index.php, and so forth. This should be done in the .htaccess file. You will not transfer link juice by tranferring domain to domain, etc. You must do it url to url.
Hope it helps.
-
You say you have put index.php at the end of all the URLs? So each page is in it's own directory?
Harald is 100% correct but I am wondering; did you always have each page in it's own directory or was that part of the recent change? If the file names used to be more SEO friendly (i.e. keywords in the file name) and now they are just named index.php then that could have a lot to do with your rankings dropping.
Just wanted to add that, cheers.
-
Hi Authority Sitebuilder, First of all Google doesn't seem to care about these but for users' sake, for the sake of conformity and as a good practice, it is best to do a redirect
from(example)
to
http://www.website.com/index.php
In other words, select one URL and stick with it, redirect all others. Make a 301 redirect of your old URLs to your new URLs. Then it should not affect your ranking unless you will do some other changes on your pages As you said earlier that all the back links go to the http://www.website.com (old url), so it is better to redirects o the new url i.e http://www.website.com/index.php
I hope that your query had been solved.
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
-
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Marking Ads As Ads
In marking paid ads as "advertisement" for the sake of Google organic, if you have a block of small ads, do you have to mark each and every one as an advertisement? For instance, let's say you have a block of small ads in the right column... mark each one or just at the top or what? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
Will obfuscating HTML have a bad effect on my ranking?
I would like to obfuscate my HTML so that people do not see that I used a Template on my site. Does obfuscating HTML have a bad effect on the ranking in google? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google. It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index. I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0
