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.
Why do some URLs for a specific client have "/index.shtml"?
-
Reviewing our client's URLs for a 301 redirect strategy, we have noticed that many URLs have "/index.shtml." The part we don'd understand is these URLs aren't the homepage and they have multiple folders followed by "/index.shtml" Does anyone happen to know why this may be occurring? Is there any SEO value in keeping the "/index.shtml" in the URL?
-
SHTML is an old-school way to use SSI (server side includes) in what is otherwise a static HTML page.
Stack Overflow talks about this in more detail here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/519619/what-is-shtmlWeb servers know that if the page is .shtml, then it's okay to run inline php code, for example.
My guess is that your .shtml files are older remnants of SSI files.
I'm not a big fan of changing URLs just to clean up things, because if you change links you will need to use a 301 redirect, and that will keep about 85% of the SEO value of the original link.
If you do want to use inline php code on .html pages, I agree with Travis, above. You can modify your .htaccess file with:
addhandler x-httpd-php5-cgi .htm
addhandler x-httpd-php5-cgi .html(This will allow you to run php in static HTML files, without having to change the file extension to .php)
Hope this helps!
- Jeff
-
It sounds like there's a problem with the .htaccess file. There's a lot of potential negatives to the situation. One of those is duplicate content.
Find out if the potential duplicates are indexed. Perform a link audit for those pages and 301 or 410, depending upon value. I'm not a big fan of 'excessive' 301 redirects, so knowing nothing else about the situation I would err on the side of 410s.
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
-
Removing a site from Google index with no index met tags
Hi there! I wanted to remove a duplicated site from the google index. I've read that you can do this by removing the URL from Google Search console and, although I can't find it in Google Search console, Google keeps on showing the site on SERPs. So I wanted to add a "no index" meta tag to the code of the site however I've only found out how to do this for individual pages, can you do the same for a entire site? How can I do it? Thank you for your help in advance! L
Technical SEO | | Chris_Wright1 -
Trying to find all internal links to a specific page (without index)
Hi guys -- Still waiting on Moz to index a page of mine. We launched a new site over two months ago. In the meantime, I really just need a list of internal links to a specific page because I want to change its URL. Does anybody know how to find that list (of internal links to 1 of my pages) without the Moz index? I appreciate the help!
Technical SEO | | marchexmarketingmcc1 -
Disallow: /404/ - Best Practice?
Hello Moz Community, My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/ Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients? I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO. Thank you in advanced, Nico.
Technical SEO | | niconico1011 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Rel="Follow"? What the &#@? does that mean?
I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML? I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Wordpress "incoming search terms" plugin
Hello everyone! newbie to SEO and have been trying to keep everything nice and ethical but I've seen on a couple of blogs today "incoming search terms" at the bottom of the blogs, then a bullet pointed list of search terms beneath it. So I had a quick search about the use of it and noticed wordpress has a plugin that automatic ally generates these "incoming search terms". I ask is this a legitimate plugin or will this harm my blog? I assume it generally will as I can't see this being much use for the audience, rather it would be 100% for trying to lure in search engines.
Technical SEO | | acecream0 -
"nofollow pages" or "duplicate content"?
We have a huge site with lots of geographical-pages in this structure: domain.com/country/resort/hotel domain.com/country/resort/hotel/facts domain.com/country/resort/hotel/images domain.com/country/resort/hotel/excursions domain.com/country/resort/hotel/maps domain.com/country/resort/hotel/car-rental Problem is that the text on ie. /excursions is often exactly the same on .../alcudia/hotel-sea-club/excursion and .../alcudia/hotel-beach-club/excursion The two hotels offer the same excursions, and the intro text on the pages are the exact same throughout the entire site. This is also a problem on the /images and /car-rental pages. I think in most cases the only difference on these pages is the Title, description and H1. These pages do not attract a lot of visits through search-engines. But to avoid them being flagged as duplicate content (we have more than 4000 of these pages - /excursions, /maps, /car-rental, /images), do i add a nofollow-tag to these, do i block them in robots.txt or should i just leave them and live with them being flagged as duplicate content? Im waiting for our web-team to add a function to insert a geographical-name in the text, so i could add ie #HOTELNAME# in the text and thereby avoiding the duplicate text. Right now we have intros like: When you visit the hotel ... instead of: When you visit Alcudia Sea Club But untill the web-team has fixed these GEO-tags, what should i do? What would you do and why?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Does it really matter to maintain 301 redirect after de-indexing of old URLs?
Today, I was reading latest blog post on SEOmoz blog about. Uncrawled 301s - A Quick Fix for When Relaunches Go Too Well This is very interesting study about 301 & How it useful to maintain traffic. I'm working on eCommerce website and I have done similar stuff on my website. I have big confusion to manage 301 redirect. My website generates new URLs due to following actions. Re-write dynamic URLs. Re-launch entire website on different eCommerce platform. [osCommerce to Magento Commerce] Re-name category. Trasfer one product from one category to another category. I'm managing my 301 redirect with old practice. Excel sheet data from Google webmaster tools and set specific new URLs for redirect. Hoooo... Now, I have 8.5K redirect in htaccess... And, I'm thinking it's too much. Can we remove old 301 redirect from htaccess or not? This is big question for me. Because, all pages are not hyperlink on external website. Google have just de-indexed old URLs and indexed new URLs. So, Is it require to maintain 301 redirect after Google process?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0
