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 there,

Sorry, can you clarify - are you saying that your client supposedly has links on pages like http://www.sammorganhomes.com/wp-fav/backup/supplement/semitruckleasing.html, but that those pages redirect to the spam site?

Hosting these pages as subfolders instead of subdomains should be fine, and is the "traditional" way of presenting new content with the highest likelihood that the content will inherit authority from its parent domain from an SEO point of view. They should rank just as well as if they were on subdomains or separate domains.

Separate installations and themes should not make a difference; Google will be absolutely clear in its understanding that these sub-brands are related to the main brand and to each other, so assuming you are fine with this, different design and CMS installations will not make a difference.

Hi there,

The first question, as the others have stated, is whether the content has been duplicated. If so, that's a problem no matter where the websites are located.

However, if you have two totally different websites from a content point of view on the same topic, hosting them together should not be a big problem. The only issue would be Google's understanding that the two resources were owned by the same entity, and therefore ranking them together might not constitute the most diverse user experience for people searching on the topic. Google reads registration information as well, and also understands that some servers / hosting services host hundreds of thousands of websites so some topic cross-over is natural without the sites being owned by the same person or company. If you had two sites selling pet food on the same dedicated server for the sole purpose of having two sites rank for the same pet food queries, I'm not 100% sure Google would ignore their hosting though.

Hi there,

Realistically, the tag should be used for duplicates, yes. How "duplicated" a page is, is subjective: a page with 50% of the same content as another page is probably going to count as duplicated as far as Google goes... where that line of duplication acceptability goes isn't something any of us really know.

For pages where the content is totally different besides the header and footer, you technically shouldn't use canonicalisation. However, experiments have shown that Google honours the tag, even if the pages aren't duplicates. Dr. Pete did an experiment when the tag came out (admittedly a few years ago) where he showed that you could radically reduce the number of pages Google had indexed for a site by canonicalising everything to the home page. I personally had a client do this by accident a couple of years ago, and sure enough, their number of indexed pages dropped very quickly, along with all the rankings those pages had. As an ecommerce site that was ranking for clothing terms, this was very very bad. It took about six weeks to get those rankings back again after we fixed the tags, and the tags were fixed within about five days (should have been quicker but our urgent request went into a dev queue).

So the answer would be that Google seems to honour the tag no matter the content of the pages, but I am pretty sure that if you asked a Googler, they'd tell you that it should only be used for dupes or near-dupes.

Hi Alan,

I replied to you about this on another thread, but I wanted to reiterate:

My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year.

This is not correct. Google only looks at removing or handing out Penguin penalties during a Penguin update (1, 2 or 3 times per year is the norm), but regular sites with regular link development can improve at all times. Link building might take a month or so to really show progress, but Google crawls and updates its indices almost constantly. It's simply not true that you will only see ranking improvements once or twice a year.

Similarly, you can lose rankings if you lose links that were counting, outside of a Penguin update.

Regarding DA and PA - yes, you can rank well with any combination of these. They are not indicators of how well you will rank, but a gauge of what your site's authority is relative to every other site Moz analyses, based upon backlinks. DA and PA are configured in a way that is meant to best represent how Moz believes Google values backlink profiles, but clearly Moz doesn't have access to Google's actual algorithm or measures of which links Google counts / discounts / values / doesn't value.

Also, "can I rank well" depends on what query you want to rank for. You will easily outrank a far higher authority website if your site is much more relevant to the query (although it's annoying to see high authority websites pop into SERPs for queries that they're not particularly relevant for, and it does happen from time to time).

If you have relatively low authority and you're trying to rank against similar websites with DA / PA scores in the 70s or so, your job is likely to be a lot harder. That said, it can still be done with focus on the specific niches you're interested in and work on improving the number and quality of links pointing to the site.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane

If you are happy for the second page to still exist but not rank, you should use the canonical tag to point the second page to the first one. This will lend the first page the majority of the strength of the second page and perhaps improve its authority and ranking as a result. However, the second page will no longer be indexed because the canonical tag tells Google: "ignore this page over here; it should be considered the same as the canonical version, here."

Again, this can benefit the first page, but it does mean that the second page will no longer rank at all. Only do this if you are okay with that scenario.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Teddy,

Does this seem to have been resolved, or are you still receiving the notice about an invalid URL?