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.
Linking to root domain or index page
-
While link building, should I link to index page of my website i.e www.mydomainname.com/index.html or should I link to root domain i.e www.mydomainname,com
Also I see duplicate title error for index page and root domain in error statistic. How can I get rid of this.
-
Hi Arti,
Generally, you want to link to your root domain. Many common website templates link to home as /index.html, but that really hasn't been necessary for years.
The easiest way to fix this would be to add a canonical tag in your homepage, which is the /index.html file. It would go in the section and look like this:
After you add this, when you look at your source code for your homepage, you should see this tag in there from whatever address you reached the page from.
There's a lot of information on duplicate content out there, and a lot of different ways to fix the same problem. Here's a good overview of the subject:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
Best of luck with your SEO.
-
To me, that's not what your 404 page is for. I wouldn't recommend doing it. What happens if they typo something, or hit a bad link some other way? There's no message to tell them what happened and it creates a confusing user experience.
Better, in my opinion, to redirect the file individually
Arti, there's a good article on SEOmoz about redirects. Down the bottom, there are some how-to guides on how to do things like 301's. Just be careful of infinite loops if you're using apache.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work
-
Hi Anthony, Thanks for your reply. Does that mean that I should actually remove index.html from my website. Also please help me for 301 redirect. Rgds Arti
-
If you have wordpress you can add
<code>php header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: ".get_bloginfo('url')); exit(); ?></code>
<code>to your 404 page.</code>
-
Hi Arti,
You'll just need to create a 301 redirect from www.yoursite.com/index.html to www. yoursite.com. This will permanently eliminate the /index.html version (which is a duplicate page) and fix the duplicate content error.
After that, build links to www.yoursite.com.
Hope this help. If you need more info on how to do the 301 redirect just let me know.
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
-
linking domain issues
Hello guys. I am having issues with my linking domains. These domains are made outside of my website. I have tried to disavow these links but not able to do it. These are mostly from google redirects links. Here is the```
Link Building | | Rom1988z
code_text0 -
Value of Links? What is each link worth?
Morning Everyone, I just had this thought and wondered what everyone's opinions were in terms of link value in monetary terms. We'll assume for the purposes of this that the links come from contextually relevant sites and that the sites in question have got the Moz DA from being high quality and have a good quality incoming link profile. Its a bit of a theoretical question, but i guess imagine if the only way you could get links was to pay for them, what would they be worth to you. This is link value for SEO purposes, they will have in addition value from traffic from good sites, that no doubt varies wildly depending on topic. I assume everyone also agrees on: The first link from a domain is the most valuable High DA sites are worth more than low ones. So could anyone who has an opinion on the link value suggest a monetary value for links. Its really just using a monetary amount to see how best to target my time. Here is my example of what might be expected, but I am hoping people with more knowledge will perhaps correct it. DA Rating First Link 2nd-5th Link 5th-10th Link 10Plus Links 5 $5 $2 $1 $0 15 $7 $3 $2 $1 25 $25 $10 $5 $2 35 $45 $20 $7 $3 45 $65 $30 $11 $4 55 $95 $45 $19 $5 65 $200 $100 $45 $6 75 $350 $120 $65 $9 85 $700 $240 $95 $15 95 $1100 $450 $200 $30
Link Building | | wellandpower1 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | | Turkey0 -
Best way to structure a service area page with many locations to maximize internal links to them?
Currently our service area page (http://www.njlimocarservice.com/services.html) very sloppily lists many of the towns we serve in multiple counties - over 50 approx (scroll down). They have been placed that way so there is links to them from one of the subpages directly linked from the root domain. I am now attempting to make it pretty and organized with my designer. I intend to maintain a link to each individual town/landing page for SEO purposes to keep it close to root domain. My questions is how to best structure this. I don't want to list by county because some people don't know what county the town is in. However an alphabetical list may be overkill as there is so many. The other option is to get a search form or dropdown list on there but how will my landing pages be recognized by crawlers if there is no internal links from my root domain? Eventually we plan to expand further so what happens when we add 100+ landing pages? What will then happen to my internal link juice? Thanks!
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
How to make google index the page title has changed ?
Google has indexed all my websites, but I have to change some title in the website but when checking google does not update the change.
Link Building | | tuananh0688
Please help me .
My site : http://blog.addme.vn0 -
What are your favorite tactics for getting links to money-pages?
We've got content marketing and other great tactics for getting links to content pages, but what are your favorite tactics for getting links to your money pages (i.e. product pages, landing pages, devices pages, sales letters, etc.) For example: For certain sites (especially some ecommerce sites), one can get a few backlinks by doing giveaways, contests, or events Some sites can give their product to bloggers to review If you're selling an exciting product and/or a product that appeals to a passionate user base, such tactics can work great. There are some sites that such tactics won't work very well for, though. For example, if you sell a boring or highly specialized product that bloggers won't want to review or giveaway as a contest prize - such as valves used in a specific commercial application, or an expensive B2B product that you can't really giveaway. Creativity is of course important, but sometimes it can only take you so far. What are your favorite strategies for getting quality backlinks to your "money pages" especially for sites that don't fit into the "ecommerce site selling cool stuff" category?
Link Building | | AdamThompson0 -
Etsy.com --Getting link juice through other pages on search results?
My sister has a store page on etsy.com where she sells home made crafts. And I want to help her rank higher on google with some of the other etsy stores. So i started to look at the other etsy store pages that are ranking well on google and found that they have a page authority between 48 to 52. So i looked at the backlinks of the ones ranking well on google with high page authority and found that many of their best links came from the internal search results page on etsy.com, and some only had one link from just an arbitrary etsy.com search page. I'm thinking this is because another product being listed on the seach page has a high page authority which then passes some of its link juice onto every other product on the page. But what is interesting is products are always being sold or getting added so even though you are on a search results page that happens to benifit from the link juice of another product the next time the page gets crawled you will be on a different search page. So i am thinking in order to maintain high page authority to you just have to have a lot of products listed so that there is a greater likely hood that you will find yourself on the same search page as another high authority page. I have not been doing SEO very long so i would love to hear what others think. I really have no idea, am i on the right track with this? (edited post) Thanks
Link Building | | doug5650 -
Do links from my own subdomain to my main domain carry any value?
I currently have a Wordpress blog set up on a subdomain i.e blog@ etc. I wanted to know whether the links from the blog to my main site carry any value.
Link Building | | Store210