Two Entrances to Homepage

[planetnut]

If you have www.domain.com PR 5 and www.domain.com/default.asp PR 4 and they are both the homepage, should you and would it be ok to block the default.asp page from being indexed within the robots txt file?

[rainborick]

No. Do not block default.asp. Google will eventually canonicalize the two URLs. They know that index.htm, index.html, index.shtml, default.htm, etc. are common default page names and they have a process that runs periodically to detect and correct this situation. You might speed things up by changing your internal links to point to the root URL (as in "http://www.yoursite.com/") whenever you link back to the main page. But if you block default.asp and it causes Google's canonicalization process to get confused there's a small but non-zero possibility that you could block your site's main page completely. I think webmasters are getting overly paranoid about the machinations of Google these days, but I'm a devout coward when it comes to any manipulation on the main page URL's status in the search engines.

[theBear]

rainborick,

[mattcutts.com...]

IMS Google changed how it handles such things oh about the fall of 2004.

However I am a very old bear, as bears go, so maybe I've missed a thing or so.

[edited by: tedster at 11:05 pm (utc) on Nov. 30, 2006]
[edit reason] make the link direct [/edit]

[Philosopher]

In a situation such as yours I would..

1) Make sure EVERY page in your site that links to your homepage links to it as the domain only with no page name.

2) 301 Redirect requests for domain.com/default.asp to domain.com/

[g1smd]

>> they have a process that runs periodically to detect and correct this situation <<

They certainly used to have such a system, back in 2002 and 2003, and maybe into 2004, but I don't think that same system works now.

Recent advice seems to be to 301 redirect to a URL that ends with a trailing "/" directly after the domain or folder name.

[steveb]

"Google will eventually canonicalize the two URLs"

If you mean in the next 50 years, I'd bet that is right.

If you mean within the next two years, there is no evidence to support that. Sometimes they get it right, but they often get it wrong. It's senseless to not canonicalize all this yourself. Content should only be displayed on one URL.

[Decius]

I would recommend you check the URL when it is loaded and do a 301 so that there is no confusion. (and obviously change all the links you control to point to the base domain and NOT default.asp)

[knjemily]

We used g1smd's approach and it worked well. We also changed all of our internal links to the home page to the default. Google figured it out in less than a week. Up till then we had 1 page indexed as our home page and 3 different supplemental pages referencing the home page. Don't forget to do it to directories/folders also. We saw minor improvement in SERP's.

[g1smd]

>> We also changed all of our internal links to the home page to the default. <<

Just to clarify (mainly for those people that are just skimming the thread), do you mean "default" as in "default.asp" or do you mean "default" as in "/"?

I assume you mean URLs ending in "/"

[knjemily]

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. We went to the www.website.com/ approach (Trailing /) rather than www.website.com/index.htm.

Ken