Index Page Redirect to Home Page? Best Practices...
-
Hi,
I am wondering what the best practice is when a site has an index page and a home page?
I have two pages, listed below, and want to know if I should 301 redirect my "index" page to my standard home page. The home page is where I would like all traffic to fall on for our website. Additionally, I used the rel=canonical tag years ago on the index page to indicate that the home page is the main content.
Home Page - https://www.1099pro.com/ (PA 45)
- Home Page Canonical: rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/>
Index Page - https://www.1099pro.com/index.asp (PA - 33)
- Index Page Canonical: rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/>
It seems to me that there is some extra juice that could be passed to my home page (which is the page that ranks highly for our major keywords) by 301 redirecting the index page. Is there any reason why I should not do that?
Really appreciate any help - especially with extra explanations - for the simple minded like me ;)!
-Michael
-
Hi Michael,
SEO Text book and best practices, if there are any, say that whenever there are multiple pages that serve the same content ,and you acknowledge that only one of them is critical: redirect other pages to the primary. Thinking like this: redirect /index.asp to the root page.
Just for the sake of clearing a little about the "there is some extra juice": Analyzing both pages through Moz's or any other private metric could lead you to wrong conclusions. Here, Moz creates its metrics with an algorithm taking into account links and some other magic. Here some information about Moz's Page Authority
Thinking like that, its perfectly normal that some other page gets more links and have different PA, even though being canonicals of each other. It also reinforces the idea that it should be redirected.On a side note, Google publicly said that doesn't use metrics like Moz's to rank a website/page. Just having a canonical is almost enough to transfer its authority.
Hope it helps.
Best luck
Gaston
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
-
Best Location for Copy Block
We are having discussions around the appropriate location to place the SEO copy block on an eCommerce category page. Would like to get the communities opinion to share with the creative team.
Web Design | | TukTown0 -
Is it still necessary to have a "home" page button/link in the top nav?
Or is it not necessary to have a "home" tab/link because everybody by this time knows you can get to the home page by clicking on the logo?
Web Design | | FindLaw0 -
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
No-index part of page
Hi All, I want to copy articles from CNN/Bloomberg/etc and I want to show the content to my users in Lightbox (CSS), but the problem is duplicate content. Do you have any idea how can I no-index part of page/content?
Web Design | | JohnPalmer0 -
Website Home page suddenly disappeared after changing Hosting
HI All, My site was ranking very well and was in 1st page of google for most of my keywords. Last week we did some update to the site and moved it to new hosting and from then onwards I dont see my site home page in Google ranking . My Website Name is : royalevents.com.au. We used to be in 1st of Google for keywords like wedding Mandaps, Indian Wedding Mandaps etc, Would be great if some one helps us to figure out whats gone wrong .. I also did Webmaster Fetch as Google but nothing happened. Thanks
Web Design | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Best course of action when removing 100's of pages from your site?
We had a section on our site Legal News (we are a law firm). All we did there was rehash news stories from news sites (no original content). We decided to remove the entire Legal News section and we were left with close to 800 404's. Around this same time our rankings seemed to drop. Our webmaster implemented 301's to closely related content on our blog. In about a weeks time our rankings went back up. Our webmaster informed us that we should submit each url to Google for removal, which we did. Its been about three weeks and our Not Found errors in WMT is over 800 and seems to be increasing daily. Moz's crawler says we have only 35 404's and they are from our blog not the legal news section we removed. The last thing we want is to have another rankings drop. Is this normal? What is the best course of action when removing hundreds of pages from your site?
Web Design | | MFC0 -
So apparently SEO moz will get us de-indexed according to a SEO company!
Each and every day i get called up from an SEO company who promises to get me top spots in Google rankings if i quickly get on their special offer they have today normally i would say "no thanks and put the phone down" but i had a bit of spare time so i indulged the guy and we got talking. After the introductions and speal about his company he was showing me what his company does and how they go about it to get me top ranks (they don't get me ranks but create a website they own which then passes leads to me- kinda clever since they could then start charging me per lead or my competitors) We continued to talk and i mentioned i used SEOmoz to check my rankings and back links etc and he told me that Google are cracking down and anyone using these types of software/websites will get their websites de indexed. This struck me as BS but i wanted to get your thoughts on the matter, i personally don't believe Google would ever do such a thing as this since it would be so easy to get your competitors websites taken down (i.e. negative seo) but its certainly a talking point.
Web Design | | GarethEJones0 -
Optimal redirect configuration from a misspelled domain that we own.
We have a handful of inbound links to www.t-chek.com (note the hyphen). Our normal site is www.tchek.com (no hyphen). We own both domains and have some sort of domain-wide redirect set up now. This works fine for traffic, but I suspect it's not optimal for SEO purposes. I came to this conclusion by looking in OSE and noticing that none of the inbound links to www.t-chek.com were also being attributed to www.tchek.com. 2 questions: Is it immediately evident what type of redirect I have in place now, or do I need to figure that out? Is the fix as simple as editing the .htaccess file on the hyphenated domain? I don't have direct control over the hyphenated domain, and I'd like to be able to know exactly what we need to do so I can request help from my IT department. I'd appreciate hearing your wisdom. Thanks!
Web Design | | SheriGolla0