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.
Is it bad to have /index.php at the end of a uri?
-
Is it bad for SEO if traffic is directed to "http://www.example.com/someuri/index.php" instead of "http://www.example.com/someuri/" and would it be works setting up a redirect rule at htaccess level?
-
Yes bad for both. You now have the name of a file acting as the name of a folder.
As mentioned above - kill the use of index.php as your index "file" - just end in a slash.
I know php treats these as routes/queries that then produce a page, but it can get things all messed up real quick.
-
Oops thanks for all you answers, but what i should have said is: Is having "/index.php/" half way through the URI like so
"http://www.example.com/someuri/index.php/more_uri/"
bad for SEO/UX?
To clarify if one searched on Google for more_uri and everything else was equal would the index.php in the middle of that URI be damaging to the ranking?
Sorry about that
-
Whilst I don't think the index.php will have a direct impact on the SEO of your website it could easily have an indirect impact.
As CleverPhD rightly points out it is a pain in the *** to remember and type that sort of URL.
Not only for yourself but also for other websites and customers.
The impact this has is hard to quantify... If I'm a site in your niche and want to link to you does this put me off? What if I link to the wrong site?
Beyond that ending in index isn't as nice a user experience as just ending at the page name and ultimately its my belief that if you do whats best for the user you'll get good results from google.
-
Correct - the duplicate issue is what will hurt you. Whatever you go with, make sure the other variants 301 redirect to the "true" page.
-
OK thanks, so index.php won't effect the SEO results. But not redirecting it, as both /index.php and / work correctly and go to the same php file, will result in the same content being registered twice by Google I'm guessing?
-
It is not "bad", although typical style would be that you can drop it as the extra characters are not needed and nobody likes extra typing - just ask Mr. Twitter. He used brevity to become a billionaire! Hmm .. I wish we could get Moz points for alliteration.
What is key is that you are consistent in your use of it. If you want to use /index.php then go for it. Just make sure every time you link to that URL in your menus or in articles when you Twiddle it of Farcebook it, you include the /index.php at the end as you do not want to have duplicate URLs for the same page. I would also setup 301 redirects so that the / only version redirects to the index.php version.
All of that said, you are going to find that after the 104th time of Twiddling that URL, you will say, "Gee, it sure is a pain to type all those extra characters." You will also find that when people are going to share your URLs they may have a tendency to drop the index.php as again, it is extra work. If you have the redirect in place, you will be ok, but I say, why have you and everyone else do all that extra work to start with. Just start with the URL ending in the slash and stay with that. Have all other versions of the index page (index.php, index.htm or even a non slashed version, etc) 301 redirect to the URL that ends in a /.
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
-
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
Hi there, We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category). Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place): Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward. Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change. Thank you! Joe
Web Design | | Joe_Stoffel1 -
Problems preventing Wordpress attachment pages from being indexed and from being seen as duplicate content.
Hi According to a Moz Crawl, it looks like the Wordpress attachment pages from all image uploads are being indexed and seen as duplicate content..or..is it the Yoast sitemap causing it? I see 2 options in SEO Yoast: Redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL. Media...Meta Robots: noindex, follow I set it to (1) initially which didn't resolve the problem. Then I set it to option (2) so that all images won't be indexed but search engines would still associate those images with their relevant posts and pages. However, I understand what both of these options (1) and (2) mean, but because I chose option 2, will that mean all of the images on the website won't stand a chance of being indexed in search engines and Google Images etc? As far as duplicate content goes, search engines can get confused and there are 2 ways for search engines
Web Design | | SEOguy1
to reach the correct page content destination. But when eg Google makes the wrong choice a portion of traffic drops off (is lost hence errors) which then leaves the searcher frustrated, and this affects the seo and ranking of the site which worsens with time. My goal here is - I would like all of the web images to be indexed by Google, and for all of the image attachment pages to not be indexed at all (Moz shows the image attachment pages as duplicates and the referring site causing this is the sitemap url which Yoast creates) ; that sitemap url has been submitted to the search engines already and I will resubmit once I can resolve the attachment pages issues.. Please can you advise. Thanks.0 -
Bing Indexation and handling of X-ROBOTS tag or AngularJS
Hi MozCommunity, I have been tearing my hair out trying to figure out why BING wont index a test site we're running. We're in the midst of upgrading one of our sites from archaic technology and infrastructure to a fully responsive version.
Web Design | | AU-SEO
This new site is a fully AngularJS driven site. There's currently over 2 million pages and as we're developing the new site in the backend, we would like to test out the tech with Google and Bing. We're looking at a pre-render option to be able to create static HTML snapshots of the pages that we care about the most and will be available on the sitemap.xml.gz However, with 3 completely static HTML control pages established, where we had a page with no robots metatag on the page, one with the robots NOINDEX metatag in the head section and one with a dynamic header (X-ROBOTS meta) on a third page with the NOINDEX directive as well. We expected the one without the meta tag to at least get indexed along with the homepage of the test site. In addition to those 3 control pages, we had 3 pages where we had an internal search results page with the dynamic NOINDEX header. A listing page with no such header and the homepage with no such header. With Google, the correct indexation occured with only 3 pages being indexed, being the homepage, the listing page and the control page without the metatag. However, with BING, there's nothing. No page indexed at all. Not even the flat static HTML page without any robots directive. I have a valid sitemap.xml file and a robots.txt directive open to all engines across all pages yet, nothing. I used the fetch as Bingbot tool, the SEO analyzer Tool and the Preview Page Tool within Bing Webmaster Tools, and they all show a preview of the requested pages. Including the ones with the dynamic header asking it not to index those pages. I'm stumped. I don't know what to do next to understand if BING can accurately process dynamic headers or AngularJS content. Upon checking BWT, there's definitely been crawl activity since it marked against the XML sitemap as successful and put a 4 next to the number of crawled pages. Still no result when running a site: command though. Google responded perfectly and understood exactly which pages to index and crawl. Anyone else used dynamic headers or AngularJS that might be able to chime in perhaps with running similar tests? Thanks in advance for your assistance....0 -
How to split organic traffic for A/B testing
This might be a silly questions as I may be missing something completely obvious here, but we are completely new to A/B testing. Our site doesn't receive a phenomenal amount of traffic although we are looking to set up some A/B testing for our popular products. Is there a way to split organic traffic for a specific product page. I'm aware that we need to experiment which one performs better in Analytics but I'm unsure how to redirect 50% of the organic traffic.
Web Design | | Jseddon920 -
How to rewrite/redirect a folder name with .htaccess
I have a folder in my site that I want to rename. I don’t want to just rewrite the URL and keep my old folder name, I want to change the folder name and then do whatever is necessary with .hataccess to not lose search engine rankings. The folder name I want to change has a space in it and also is misspelled (whoops x2) Example. Mysite.com/old foldr/page.html Mysite.com/newfolder/page.html How would I go about doing this with .htaccess? Do I just switch the folder name on my server and then set up a redirect, or do I do a rewrite? Sorry now familiar with the terms or .htacces. Thanks all
Web Design | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Are Carousels Bad for SEO?
My real estate web site was migrated form Drupal to Wordpress last July. The ranking have dropped a lot since migration. One of the things we changed is that we have added two carousels to the home page. Most of the text is below the carousels. Is this bad for SEO? Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Footer Links Good or bad?
Hi Can anyone answer this question confidently, I know Google is moving away from lots of links within the footer. However we specialise in websites for the travel industry and having a link to all the areas at the footer can be quite handy. Our websites complete this automatically. Here is an example where due to design of the site the links don't quite fit well, so we need to change anyway. But before completing the work I wondered if there was a better way to do this. http://www.dreamvillasitaly.com/ Many thanks Andy
Web Design | | iprosoftware0 -
Duplicate Content for index.html
In the Crawl Diagnostics Summary, it says that I have two pages with duplicate content which are: www.mywebsite.com/ www.mywebsite.com/index.html I read in a Dream Weaver tutorial that you should name your home page "index.html" and then you can let www.mywebsite.com automatically direct the user to index.html. Is this a bug in SEOMoz's crawler or is it a real problem with my site? Thank you, Dan
Web Design | | superTallDan0