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
-
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Google index
Hello, I removed my site from google index From GWT Temporarily remove URLs that you own from search results, Status Removed. site not ranking well in google from last 2 month, Now i have question that what will happen if i reinclude site url after 1 or 2 weeks. Is there any chance to rank well when google re index the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
Should We Remove Content Through Google Webmaster Tools?
We recently collapsed an existing site in order to relaunch it as a much smaller, much higher quality site. In doing so, we're facing some indexation issues whereas a large number of our old URLs (301'd where appropriate) still show up for a site:domain search. Some relevant notes: We transitioned the site from SiteCore to Wordpress to allow for greater flexibility The Wordpress CMS went live on 11/22 (same legacy content, but in the new CMS) The new content (and all required 301s) went live on 12/2 The site's total number of URLS is currently at 173 (confirmed by ScreamingFrog) As of posting this question, a site:domain search shows 6,110 results While it's a very large manual effort, is there any reason to believe that submitting removal requests through Google Webmaster Tools would be helpful? We simply want all indexation of old pages and content to disappear - and for Google to treat the site as a new site on the same old domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | d50-Media0 -
Home page not being indexed
Hi Moz crew. I have two sites (one is a client's and one is mine). They are both Wordpress sites and both are hosted on WP Engine. They have both been set up for a long time, and are "on-page" optimized. Pages from each site are indexed, but Google is not indexing the homepage for either site. Just to be clear - I can set up and work on a Wordpress site, but am not a programmer. Both seem to be fine according to my Moz dashboard. I have Webmaster tools set up for each - and as far as I can tell (definitely not an exper in webmaster tools) they are okay. I have done the obvious and checked that the the box preventing Google from crawling is not checked, and I believe I have set up the proper re-directs and canonicals.Thanks in advance! Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Why would one of our section pages NOT be indexed by Google?
One of our higher traffic section pages is not being indexed by Google. The products that reside on this section page ARE indexed by Google and are on page 1. So why wouldn't the section page be even listed and indexed? The meta title is accurate, meta description is good. I haven't received any notices in Webmaster Tools. Is there a way to check to see if OTHER pages might also not be indexed? What should a small ecom site do to see about getting it listed? SOS in Modesto. Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Why my site it's not being indexed?
Hello.... I got to tell that I feel like a newbie (I am, but know I feel like it)... We were working with a client until january this year, they kept going on their own until september that they contacted us again... Someone on the team that handled things while we were gone, updated it´s robots.txt file to Disallow everything... for maybe 3 weeks before we were back in.... Additionally they were working on a different subdomain, the new version of the site and of course the didn't block the robots on that one. So now the whole site it's been duplicated, even it´s content, the exact same pages exist on the suddomain that was public the same time the other one was blocked. We came in changes the robots.txt file on both server, resend all the sitemaps, sent our URL on google+... everything the book says... but the site it´s not getting indexed. It's been 5 weeks now and no response what so ever. We were highly positioned on several important keywords and now it's gone. I now you guys can help, any advice will be highly appreciated. thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Website is not indexed in Google, please help with suggestions
Our client website was removed from Google index. Anybody could recommend how to speed up process of re index: Webmaster tools done SM done (Twitter, FB) sitemap.xml done backlinks in process PPC done Robots.txt is fine Guys any recommendations are welcome, client is very unhappy. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThinkBDW0 -
To index or not to index search pages - (Panda related)
Hi Mozzers I have a WordPress site with Relevanssi the search engine plugin, free version. Questions: Should I let Google index my site's SERPS? I am scared the page quality is to thin, and then Panda bear will get angry. This plugin (or my previous search engine plugin) created many of these "no-results" uris: /?s=no-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Akids+wall&cat=no-results&pg=6 I have added a robots.txt rule to disallow these pages and did a GWT URL removal request. But links to these pages are still being displayed in Google's SERPS under "repeat the search with the omitted results included" results. So will this affect me negatively or are these results harmless? What exactly is an omitted result? As I understand it is that Google found a link to a page they but can't display it because I block GoogleBot. Thanx in advance guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClassifiedsKing0