www.example.com goes to www.example.com/index.php

Is this ok? what about incoming links to www.example.com and pagerank?

[illusionist]

Is this ok? what about incoming links to www.site.com and pagerank? I mean all the links would point to www.site.com and not www.site.com/index.php? Would i have to ask ppl to point to www.site.com/index.php instead?

[takagi]

Most likely Google will regard both pages to be the same. If the queries

link:www.site.com

and

link:www.site.com/index.php

give the same list, then you can be sure Google treats them as being one.

[pageoneresults]

Most likely Google will regard both pages to be the same.

True in most cases. I have seen instances where those two URIs produce different PageRank scores. I highly recommend that you encourage your link partners to link to the URI without adding the index.php. Why? You never know when the underlying technology will change so this would be my suggestion...

www.example.com/

Be sure to include the forward trailing slash. Same method applies to any root level pages at the sub-directory level...

www.example.com/sub/

[millie]

POR,
Sorry to gatecrash ... why is the trailing slash important? Don't the SEs add it automatically?
Thanks in advance, M

[illusionist]

yes both the queries give the same result. Is there way to make www.site.com/index.php to ww.site.com.....masking good idea? also is it necessary?

[pageoneresults]

Don't the SEs add it automatically?

Not in all cases and I don't know why. I know our servers are configured to automatically add the trailing forward slash to any root level URIs. Adding the trailing forward slash is good practice. If you do a search here at WebmasterWorld, there are many topics on the trailing forward slash issue.

[pageoneresults]

Is there way to make www.site.com/index.php to ww.site.com.....masking good idea?

Hmmm, you shouldn't have to unless of course your link partners are linking to the full URI of the root level page. In that case, you'll need to set up a 301 Moved Permanently redirect to handle those requests if you want to. It shouldn't really matter. Unfortunately, the SEs will index that full URI. If you ever change from .php to something else, it will present problems.

[illusionist]

I think everybosy would link as www.site.com, it hasnt been indexed yet. I can do the 301 permanet re-direct....is it recommnded that i do so? what are the pros and cons...anybody?

[takagi]

yes both the queries give the same result.

So Google regards them as one page, with one PageRank an no reason to see problems for duplicate content.

Try Server Header Check [webmasterworld.com] to better understand how browsers/spiders see the link between

www.site.com

and

www.site.com/index.php

[kerry]

Hmmm. My site has a redirect at www.mysite.com to www.mysite.com/home.cfm. I submit the latter URL to SEs and link exchanges. Do you think this is a problem? If so, is there a way to have www.mysite.com/home.cfm as the default so I don't need the redirect?

Thanks!
Kerry

[illusionist]

Both give me the same result...

www.site.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 13:45:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.2 PHP/4.3.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2634 mod_ssl/2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.3
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

www.site.com/index.php

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 13:46:27 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.2 PHP/4.3.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2634 mod_ssl/2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.3
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

[Smith]

Just to add to this conversation, one of my main sites index's has two different Google page ranks.

site.com has a page rank of 5
site.com/index.php has a page rank of 4

Both the exactly same page, we figure it's because of people linking to the site minus the index.php :)

[illusionist]

hmm..thats not good..same thing might happen to me...:( Anyway around this?

[lty83]

I had takin my site from myname.com to myname.com/index.asp and my page rank went from 5 to 0, however, if you just typed in myname.com it would remain 5, where if you added the index.asp at the end it would be 0, even at 0 my page still had high rankings, probably because it was 5 without the excess index.asp

[illusionist]

my site goes straight to /index.php and not site.com....:(