.htaccess Question and Ranking
-
I have some basic rules set up in my .htaccess file and just curious as to the implications of them as I seem to have a website ranking very low on Search indexes for no particular reason that I can fathom. My question is a follows
I have a htaccess rules set up in my application application that first strips the file suffix and then adds a closing brace for example
Rule 1: http://www.domain.com/my_page.php becomes http://www.domain.com/my_page
Rule 2: http://www.domain.com/my_page becomes http://www.domain.com/my_page/Will this rule expecially Rule 2 effect ranking or will these rule have no adverse affect on the website as my MOZ reports still seem to have pages listed win the Top Pages by PA section without the www? Below is an example of the htacess file.
RewriteEngine On
Redirect Trailing Slashes...
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]Redirect non-WWW to WWW...
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^contractor-accounts.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.contractor-accounts.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]Handle Front Controller...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L] -
I've had a look at your site (it's in the htaccess)
I've run a crawl on your site, there doesn't seem to be any redirect chains, which is good, so you've got no issues with what you have above.
However on a side note, I wouldn't rely on 301 redirects, you still have a lot of "old" links that are going through 301 redirects, I would update these so they don't need to pass through a redirect.
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
-
Is adding video to my homepage a ranking signal
Just had a lengthy chat with an SEO guy and one of the points bought up was that video on the homepage is a definite signal these days and the bots read the metas better than ever. I'm not sure about this, I do think that videos are a thing that improves the user experience but to rank? If it was to rank would I embed a YouTube video as its owned by Google, Vimeo for the quality or self-host but cause me to have a heavy page. I'm a bit lost here and would appreciate some guidance.
On-Page Optimization | | Libra_Photographic1 -
Ecommerce Canonical Question
Hi all, first question (eek) Could I pick the brains of fellow users around an issue we are having with canonical urls on a magento website. At the moment we do not have these enabled as it seems to break our indexing. Cut a long story short, we have thousands of products but haven't rewritten many of the descriptions from the manufacturers yet and so have noindexed all the product pages (freeing them as we go). The goal, for now, is to pull in traffic via the filtering options we have on the site The goal, for now, is to pull in traffic via the filtering options we have on the site. For example, if you go to Dresses, there then are several filtering options which would allow you to choose a colour, shape and material - if you wished to filter that precisely. These filtering options are all crawlable and so we would then have a page that google could index for, for example, Green Lace Maxi Dress. All good there, few people search for specific products and a lot search for types of products so we are covered. To get back to the issue at hand. If we enable the canonical option on our magento plugin it will stop us from being able to target these terms. Whereas the filtering option would create domain.com/dress/green/maxi/lace with the page title of Green Lace Maxi Dress, if we enable the canonical part of the seo plugin the canonical link which would be added to the page would be - instantly removing our ability to rank for longer tail dress related searches (we are not going to compete with the big players on the premium terms, yet!). There are alternative plugins we can buy for magento to add the correct tag, however, if every page's canonical just points back it itself like this, is there really much point spending nearly $1000 on the 4 licences we would need to cover our range of sites. Is it really necessary, in this case, that we have a canonical for the product filtering? Sorry for the long post, hope it made sense. Thanks for any assistance.
On-Page Optimization | | DSCarl0 -
Question For SEO Companies From An On-line Retailer
When employing an SEO company what should I be looking for? When I go to a companies website I look for how many keywords they have ranked on Semrush. Most of the companies that I have looked at do not rank very many. Saying most I am talking about 10-12 companies. There was one company that had a lot more than anyone else but their reviews were awful. Then I look at their clients websites to see how many keywords they have ranked and this is where I am baffled. Quite a lot of them especially retail sites with lots of products have very few keywords ranked and my belief is that the more related keywords that you have ranked the better you will do. I also look at how the thier organic traffic is doing over a number of months. what surprises me most is that companies are advertising clients websites where it looks like traffic is climbing and then all of a sudden there is a big drop. Am I missing something in order to find a company that will do what we are paying them for? Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Question About On Page Grades
New to the whole SEO game in some aspects and wanted to know about on page grades. Some of the pages I got ranks of F for are actually in the top 10 in Google. Could anyone help me to explain way these pages/tags are F's with those rankings?
On-Page Optimization | | BlackEnterprise0 -
Best Way To Pass Rank To Follow Up Article?
What is the best way to pass rank to a follow-up article? For example, we write an article "Product A Rumors" that ends up ranking #1. When Product A is released, we write an article called "Product A Review". What is the best way to pass rank from the first pre-release article to the second post-release article? We don't want to do a simple 301 redirect as we want readers to be able to go back to the first article to see the progression of the Product A life-cycle. Also, should we go back and edit the old article to add a link to the new? Should we add a link in the new article to the old? Thanks in advance 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
Factors that Affect Alexa Ranking?
Hi All,
On-Page Optimization | | PrasanthMohanachandran
Can any one please help in the factors that effects Alexa ranking.
My website Alexa rank got increased at all of sudden. It was 600000 last month it got increased to 1000000 by today and i cant even find the rank in own country which was 22000 before. Please help me in this, my organic traffic and over all traffic is constant only, how ever my website got effected. Please suggest me on this0 -
Lost Page Rank after directing http:// to WWW?
Hi I am trying to redirect all the non www urls to WWW. After I redirected them, most of my category page PR are dropped to 0. Can someone please tell me if this is the normal after effect after the redirect? Example url: this is PR2 before the redirect http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/95/Body_Kits_Front_Bumpers.html
On-Page Optimization | | ilovebodykits0 -
Ranking for competitor brand terms
We're looking to rank for competitor brand terms and have created competitor brand pages for some of our main competitors. My question is where would be most effective to place these pages on our site? Also, would this be classed as grey hat?
On-Page Optimization | | Sayers1