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.
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
-
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below.
http://www.example.com
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicatehttp://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicateI have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page.My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php
Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.comIf yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.comQuestion 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore.Is there a better option?
Thanks
-
About three different homepages: This is my reasoning: Wordpress based website uses index.php as a home page if you use "latest posts" as your home page, Even index.php is not displayed in the url address bar. Does that mean WP sites always have 2 homepages? I have removed index.htm at the moment, but I see that as a problem as I am losing PA value for that page.
Zee: So it sounds like you should create a "dynamic" front page (this link should help you: https://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page). If for some reason you are unable to remove both duplicate homepages, I'd say deprecate one and 301 redirect it to your main homepage, and implement a rel=canonical tag from the duplicated homepage to your main one (e.g. example.com/index.php -301-> example.com)
I can see that this is a bit messy.. I did this as I wanted to preserve
original htm based site URL's. Are you saying that search engines see
www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page.htm and www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page as
identical URL's.Zee: I can't say for sure, without seeing your site, but if they're indexed (discoverable by search engine crawlers), you could definitely be penalized. If your .htm pages have built up link equity, you'll need to 301 redirect them to their corresponding pages
With my old htm based website I had too many subdirectories. I have
removed some of the subs to make URLs shorter and used 301 redirects in
.htaccess file. I probably should have removed .htm appendixes as well
at this stage, but I did not.
Is there a point to do 301 redirects again? 90% of my pages have been 301 redirected as I have removed some of the old subdirectories. Are you saying that I should again 301 redirect my newly 301 redirected pages?
Zee: No, that'll result in a 301 redirect chain--you should ALWAYS 301 redirect to whatever the most appropriate, final destination is (think of 301 redirects as nonstop flights, never layovers). If I 301 redirect A --> B, but then B needs to be redirected as B --> C, you must update A's to reflect this as well, A --> C, to avoid a redirect chain.
I would like to use example.com as my home page only, I am just trying to transfer PA value of my index.htm page to example.com. Not sure how to do this.
Zee: You may want to canonical this one, in that case (especially if you can confirm that these pages present the same information)--you can implement a rel=canonical on your .htm homepage that points back to your main homepage.
-
Zee, thank you for taking time to answer my questions
Hey gozmoz--I might need a little more information from you in order to help here. It sounds like you've got potentially THREE different homepages (see below). First of all, is that right?
1. example.com
2. example.com/index.htm
3. example.com/index.php
About three different homepages:
This is my reasoning: Wordpress based website uses index.php as a home page if you use "latest posts" as your home page, Even index.php is not displayed in the url address bar.
Does that mean WP sites always have 2 homepages?
I have removed index.htm at the moment, but I see that as a problem as I am losing PA value for that page.
Big red flag to me is the Wordpress plugin you're using that automatically appends .htm to the end of every URL you've transferred to your new WP CMS--why were you unable to keep the URLs as-is, without the .htm? My rec here would be to undo that, and keep the original URLs (without .htm).
I can see that this is a bit messy..
I did this as I wanted to preserve original htm based site URL's.
Are you saying that search engines see
www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page.htm and
www.example.com/dir1/dir2/page
as identical URL's.With my old htm based website I had too many subdirectories. I have removed some of the subs to make URLs shorter and used 301 redirects in .htaccess file. I probably should have removed .htm appendixes as well at this stage, but I did not.
Question 1: As far as this question goes, I do think you'll need to clarify the above before I can make a solid rec for you. Again, my preference would be for you to use your original URLs as the main ones and deprecate these .htm versions if possible. That may require you to 301 redirect the .htm versions to the non-htm counterparts.
Is there a point to do 301 redirects again? 90% of my pages have been 301 redirected as I have removed some of the old subdirectories. Are you saying that I should again 301 redirect my newly 301 redirected pages?
Question 2: what do you mean, example.com/index.htm no longer exists? Have you deleted this page entirely? If so, you may not need to do anything here. I do however, think you need to establish a singular URL to be your homepage, and see no reason you shouldn't use example.com (on its own) as your home, instead of appending /index.htm or /index.php
I would like to use example.com as my home page only, I am just trying to transfer PA value of my index.htm page to example.com. Not sure how to do this.
Regads
Gozmoz -
Hey gozmoz--I might need a little more information from you in order to help here. It sounds like you've got potentially THREE different homepages (see below). First of all, is that right?
1. example.com
2. example.com/index.htm
3. example.com/index.phpBig red flag to me is the Wordpress plugin you're using that automatically appends .htm to the end of every URL you've transferred to your new WP CMS--why were you unable to keep the URLs as-is, without the .htm? My rec here would be to undo that, and keep the original URLs (without .htm).
**Question 1: **As far as this question goes, I do think you'll need to clarify the above before I can make a solid rec for you. Again, my preference would be for you to use your original URLs as the main ones and deprecate these .htm versions if possible. That _may _require you to 301 redirect the .htm versions to the non-htm counterparts.
Question 2: what do you mean, example.com/index.htm no longer exists? Have you deleted this page entirely? If so, you may not need to do anything here. I do however, think you need to establish a singular URL to be your homepage, and see no reason you shouldn't use example.com (on its own) as your home, instead of appending /index.htm or /index.php
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
-
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-SBWD0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeatIT
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 end0 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
Redirect posts from a wordpress.com blog over to a self-hosted blog
Hi All I started a wordpress.com blog with a few posts on it, and these have been shared using social media so links to these exist on Facebook and Twitter. I've decided that its going to be better and more effective to have the blog on my primary domain. How would I setup a redirect from the wordpress.com blog to my self hosted blog? Normally I'd write a .htaccess file but I'm unable to do that over at wordpress.com. I can't even see an option to install plugins, otherwise I would have used the "Redirector" plugin.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blacey0 -
Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint. I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOMG1 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0