Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Redirecting index.html to the root

    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

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    8
    11
    48771
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • romanbond
      romanbond last edited by

      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!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 7
      • Nikos-Kor
        Nikos-Kor @StreamlineMetrics last edited by

        @streamlinemetrics this worked for my site Finbit Solutions, too! Thank you very much!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • salena580
          salena580 @StreamlineMetrics last edited by

          It works good for my site https://uaedesertsafari.com/

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • wideangle
            wideangle @StreamlineMetrics last edited by

            works, thank you!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • almusammem
              almusammem @StreamlineMetrics last edited by

              Thank you very much, this works fine with me.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • webfeatus
                webfeatus last edited by

                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.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • enxaqueca
                  enxaqueca last edited by

                  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.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • romanbond
                    romanbond @StreamlineMetrics last edited by

                    that seems to be working well. thanks a lot for your help.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • StreamlineMetrics
                      StreamlineMetrics @romanbond last edited by

                      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.

                      romanbond almusammem wideangle salena580 Nikos-Kor 5 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 6
                      • romanbond
                        romanbond @StreamlineMetrics last edited by

                        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?

                        StreamlineMetrics 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
                        • StreamlineMetrics
                          StreamlineMetrics last edited by

                          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]

                          romanbond 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 6
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • JCN-SBWD

                            Should I disable the indexing of tags in Wordpress?

                            Hi, I have a client that is publishing 7 or 8 news articles and posts each month. I am optimising selected posts and I have found that they have been adding a lot of tags (almost like using hashtags) . There are currently 29 posts but already 55 tags, each of which has its own archive page, and all of which are added to the site map to be indexed (https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/sitemap_index.xml). I came across an article (https://crunchify.com/better-dont-use-wordpress-tags/) that suggested that tags add no value to SEO ranking, and as a consequence Wordpress tags should not be indexed or included in the sitemap. I haven't been able to find much more reliable information on this topic, so my question is - should I get rid of the tags from this website and make the focus pages, posts and categories (redirecting existing tag pages back to the site home page)? It is a relatively new websites and I am conscious of the fact that category and tag archive pages already substantially outnumber actual content pages (posts and news) - I guess this isn't optimal. I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks wMfojBf

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCN-SBWD
                            0
                          • NeatIT

                            6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash

                            i've to give some information about my website Environment 1. i have static webpage in the root. 2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/ 3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
                            folder. i want to www to non on all URLs Remove index.html from url Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
                            without .html extension Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Some examples domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/ domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/ My code in ROOT htaccess is <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
                            RewriteBase / #removing trailing slash
                            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                            RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
                            RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
                            RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
                            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
                            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                            RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
                            RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
                            RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
                            RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
                            RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> The above code do 1. redirect www to non-www
                            2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
                            3. Remove index.html
                            4. Remove all .html
                            5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeatIT
                            0
                          • alphonseha

                            Google not Indexing images on CDN.

                            My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC  We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. The above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!? Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonseha
                            0
                          • Colin.Accela

                            Setting up 301 Redirects after acquisition?

                            Hello! The company that I work for has recently acquired two other companies. I was wondering what the best strategy would be as it relates to redirects / authority. Please help! Thanks

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colin.Accela
                            0
                          • SMG-Texas

                            301 Redirect of subdomain?

                            Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community.  I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them?  I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself.  If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense.  Any thoughts are appreciated.  Thanks for your time.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas
                            0
                          • trung.ngo

                            Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index

                            I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo
                            0
                          • Davenport-Tractor

                            Redirecting non www site

                            Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT:  " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain.  301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names.  Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor
                            0
                          • coremediadesign

                            Login redirect 302

                            Ok - anyone knows what to do with the temporary redirect to the login page? In our e-commerce system we have a checkout page, which requires user to be logged in - if they are not, we redirect them to the login page using simple php header("Locaiton: url"). This however has been found as a Warning as it's a temporary redirect. I can't really put there permanent redirect for obvious reasons so if someone could give me some clue on this situation that would be much appreciated.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coremediadesign
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.