Which index page should I canonical to?
-
Hello!
I'm doing a routine clean up of my code and had a question about the canonical tag.
On the index page, I have the following:
I have never put any thought into which index path is the best to use.
http://www.example.com/index.php
Could someone shed some light on this for me? Does it make a difference?
Thanks!
Ryan
-
Make sure to backup your files before 301 and that you have FTP access just in case something happens.
I agree with Claudio's answer.
-
Your canonical is correct, (this is your root domain), also is a good practice, all the links from deeper pages pointing to your home page should be pointed to http://www.example.com/.
Additionally is a good practice to use the 301 redirect (avoid duplicates on the home page):
http://example.com/ redirect to http://www.example.com/
http://example.com/index.php redirect to http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/index.php redirect to http://www.example.com/Hope it helps
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
-
Too many SEO changes needed on a page. Create a new page?
I've been doing some research on a keyword with Page Optimization. I'm finding there's a lot of changes suggested. I'm wondering that because of the amount of changes required is it better to create a new page entirely from scratch that has all the suggestions implemented OR change the current page? Thanks, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris29181 -
Startpage and shop page shows the same thing, shall i set canonical url?
Our startpage http://siga-sverige.se/ and http://siga-sverige.se/butik/ shows the same woocommerce loop of all our products. Shall i set canonical url for http://siga-sverige.se/butik/ to http://siga-sverige.se/? Thanks! / Jonas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
302 to a page and rel=canonical back to the original (to preserve url juice)?
Bit of a weird case, but let me explain. We use unbounce.com to create our landing pages, which are on a separate sub-domain (get.domain.com).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dragonlawhq
Some of these landing pages have a substantial amount of useful information and are part of our content building strategy (our content marketers are able to deploy them without going through the dev team cycle). We'd like to make sure the seo page-juice is counting towards our primary domain and not the subdomain.
(It would also help if we one day stop using unbounce and just migrate our landing page content to our primary website). Would it be an SEO faux-pas to do the following:
domain.com/awesome-page ---[302]---> get.domain.com/awesome-page
get.domain.com/awesome-page ---[rel=canonical]---> domain.com/awesome-page My understanding is that our primary domain would hold all the "page juice" whilst sending users to the unbounce landing page - and the day we stop using unbounce, we just kill the redirect and host the content on our primary domain.0 -
Client has moved to secured https webpages but non secured http pages are still being indexed in Google. Is this an issue
We are currently working with a client that relaunched their website two months ago to have hypertext transfer protocol secure pages (https) across their entire site architecture. The problem is that their non secure (http) pages are still accessible and being indexed in Google. Here are our concerns: 1. Are co-existing non secure and secure webpages (http and https) considered duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications
2. If these pages are duplicate content should we use 301 redirects or rel canonicals?
3. If we go with rel canonicals, is it okay for a non secure page to have rel canonical to the secure version? Thanks for the advice.0 -
Do I need to re-index the page after editing URL?
Hi, I had to edit some of the URLs. But, google is still showing my old URL in search results for certain keywords, which ofc get 404. By crawling with ScremingFrog it gets me 301 'page not found' and still giving old URLs. Why is that? And do I need to re-index pages with new URLs? Is 'fetch as Google' enough to do that or any other advice? Thanks a lot, hope the topic will help to someone else too. Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Does Google crawl and spider for other links in rel=canonical pages?
When you add rel=canonical to the page, will Google still crawl your page for content and discover new links in that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
On Page vs Off Page - Which Has a Greater Effect on Rankings?
Hi Mozzers, My site will be migrating to a new domain soon, and I am not sure how to spend my time. Should I be optimizing our content for keywords, improving internal linking, and writing new content - or should I be doing link building for our current domain (or the new one)? Is there a certain ratio that determines rankings which can help me prioritize these to-dos?, such as 70:30 in favor of link-building? Thanks for any help you can offer!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Not sure why Home page is outranked by less optimized internal pages.
We launched our website just three weeks ago, and one of our primary keyword phrases is "e-business consultants". Here's what I don't get. Our home page is the page most optimized around this search phrase. Using SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool, the home page scores an "A". And yet it doesn't rank in the top 50 on Google Canada, although two other INTERNAL pages - www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-team/ & /www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-approach/ - rank 5 & 6 on Google Canada, even though they only score a grade "C" for on-page optimization for this keyword phrase. I've always understood that the home page is the most powerful page. Why are these others outranking it? I checked the crawl and Google Webmaster, and there is no obvious problem on the home page. Is this because the site is so new? It goes against all previous experience I've had in similar situation. Any guidance/ insight would be highly appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0