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.
Removing index.php
-
I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea.
I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page. I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all. Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL? I've read that it is a bad practice.
I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php. However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL.
Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links? I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales. I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file. But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting.
Any help or advice appreciated.
-
Add this to your htaccess file (remove the .txt extension from the file in order to use it)
Remove index.php or index.htm/html from URL requests
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index.(php|html?)\ HTTP/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator
RewriteRule ^([^/]+/)*index.(html?|php)$ http://your_site_URL/$1 [R=301,L]Obviously change the your_site_url to the your domain in http://your_site_URL/$1
Also remove the # before RewriteEngine On to make these changes work.
-
Devanur/Jane,
Thank you for the info.
Dan
-
As Devanur says, this will achieve your goal. It's worth reiterating that there is nothing inherently wrong with /index.php URLs as long as you cannot access the same content without /index.php. For instance, if www.site.com/page1/index.php exists as well as www.site.com/page1/, then this is duplicate content and should be fixed. I imagine this is your current situation because this is most common when /index.php is being added to URLs.
However, if only one version of every page loads and that version has the /index.php extension, this is not automatically bad. It's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness and because this does move the content one folder-level away from the root (not a huge issue, but probably best avoided) however.
If you go through 301 redirects to shift the old URLs to the new ones without /index.php, your rankings should not suffer. There might be a little bit of ranking fluctuation as Google indexes the new URLs and acknowledges the redirects, but nothing permanent. It's worth noting that this is not an absolute rule, however, and that there is always a risk of lowered rankings or rankings not returning to what they were before after a 301 redirect though.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Hi, any plugin like sh404SEF will work and accomplish your goal without hurting your rankings as long as it redirects, the index.php URLs to their corresponding without index.php URLs via 301. By the way, you don't need to list all your URLs in .htaccess file to implement this. You can go with pattern match redirection.
Here you go for more:
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/301-redirect-with-mod_rewrite-or-redirectmatch.html
and
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/htaccess-redirect-rewrite-rules.html
By the way, having index.php in URLs does not affect your SEO efforts directly but by stripping index.php from all the URLs will make them look pretty, clean and a bit user friendly.
Hope it helps. Good Luck to you.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
<colgroup><col width="182"></colgroup>
| |
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
-
Removing the Trailing Slash in Magento
Hi guys, We have noticed trailing slash vs non-trailing slash duplication on one of our sites. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup
Duplicate: https://www.example.com.au/living/
Preferred: https://www.example.com.au/living So, SEO-wise, we suggested placing a canonical tag on all trailing slash pointing to non-trailing slash. However, devs have advised against removing the trailing slash from some URLs with a blanket rule, as this may break functionality in Magento that depends on the trailing slash. The full site would need to be tested after implementing a blanket rewrite rule. Is any other way to address this trailing slash duplication issue without breaking anything in Magento? Keen to hear from you guys. Cheers,0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Dev Subdomain Pages Indexed - How to Remove
I own a website (domain.com) and used the subdomain "dev.domain.com" while adding a new section to the site (as a development link). I forgot to block the dev.domain.com in my robots file, and google indexed all of the dev pages (around 100 of them). I blocked the site (dev.domain.com) in robots, and then proceeded to just delete the entire subdomain altogether. It's been about a week now and I still see the subdomain pages indexed on Google. How do I get these pages removed from Google? Are they causing duplicate content/title issues, or does Google know that it's a development subdomain and it's just taking time for them to recognize that I deleted it already?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
When removing a product page from an ecommerce site?
What is the best practice for removing a product page from an Ecommerce site? If a 301 is not available and the page is already crawled by the search engine A. block it out in the robot.txt B. let it 404
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index
We have a similar problem to http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-a-xml-sitemap-index-point-to-other-sitemaps-indexes Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes? According to the "Unique Doll Clothing" example on this link, it seems possible http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic Can someone share an XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index example? We are looking for the format to implement the same on our website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lakshdeep0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Should I remove Meta Keywords tags?
Hi, Do you recommend removing Meta Keywords or is there "nothing to lose" with having them? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
How to deal with old, indexed hashbang URLs?
I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e. www.example.com/#!page-name-here). We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this: www.example.com/page-name-here Here's the problem: Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index. These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash. So, when the web server sees this URL www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact (www.example.com/#!page-name-here). Hopefully, that makes sense. So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/). My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage. Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage. Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no. And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months. Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries. So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs? Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #). I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way? If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue. Best, -G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Celts180