301 redirect from domain to home.aspx

[travelinnovations]

We have been asked to look at a website and have found a 301 redirect from the domain www.domain.com to www.domain.com/home.aspx.  Why would someone do this, this way round?  We can't think of a good reason and are wondering if we have overlooked something?

Thanks for your help.

[PhiloMedia]

I'll take a stab. You can use a 301 redirect to enforce your canonical URL. In this case, it may be that site decided that /home.aspx is the canonical and wanted to be sure any links out there go to it. This is a strong signal to the search engine that if it has both www.domain.com and www.domain.com/home.aspx indexed, the /home is the URL for the juice.

Now, that assumes this was done on purpose and not just some silly mistake.

I've seen sites with 4 URLs for the main page:

www.domain.com

www.domain.com/home.aspx

domain.com

domain.com/home.aspx

You can read up on Google, but one way to fix this problem is to redirect 3 of the 4 to the canonical URL.

[RyanKent]

Why would someone redirect from www.domain.com to www.domain.com/home.aspx.

There is no logical reason I can think of as to why I would make such a re-direct.

If I was to try and get into the head of the person who did the redirect, I would guess they had a index.html or similar page that showed up when users went to www.domain.com. Rather then remove the index.html page they chose to implement the redirect.

[Gyorgy]

I have a similar client or even worse. The domain is 302 redirected to the default.aspx. It's a super dodgy CMS implementation and no one could answer the question. It's been months and the dev team still hasn't fixed it.