Links to My Index Page - with and without index.html

[Sally Stitts]

I tried a new free online SEO analysis service.
They sent me a PDF summary of my website.
They said I had "bad links" (to my homepage).

On each of my pages, I have 2 links to the index page -
http://www.site.com/index.htm and in another place
http://www.site.com

The SEO analysis says that the www.site.com link is BAD!
Well, it really isn't "bad", since it works just fine.

HOWEVER, do they have a point here?
1. Is the site.com/index.htm ALWAYS preferable to the site.com link?
2. Should I change all my site.com links to site.com/index.htm?

Thank you very much for your comments.

[edited by: tedster at 7:14 pm (utc) on Jan 19, 2011]
[edit reason] make example URLs fully visible [/edit]

[icedowl]

Here's what I do:

http://www.site.com/index.htm

I never link to index.htm (or index.html)

http://www.site.com

I use this except that I always have a "/" at the end --> "http://www.site.com/"

[aristotle]

Do you use the same anchor text for both of them?

[Robert Charlton]

The SEO analysis says that the www.site.com link is BAD!

They have it backwards.

icedowl's example is correct. Link either to the canonical form of your domain or to "/". Never link to index.html.

[Sally Stitts]

I use this except that I always have a "/" at the end --> "http://www.site.com/"

Yes, me too, this is what I meant to say, but I forgot to add the /.

Do you use the same anchor text for both of them?

Kinda.

Link #1 is actually a logo (at the top of each page), with the alt text being "site name logo"
as in
h ttp://www.siteurl.com/

Link #2 (at the bottom of each page) is the "site name"
as in
h ttp://www.siteurl.com/index.htm

Note that "siteurl" and "site name" are different. I would like to correct this, but fear of changing 8-year-old links has stopped me.

On each page, there is also a third link to a sub-index
as in
h ttp://www.siteurl.com/sub-index/index.htm

There are 20 sub-indexes, and around 300 total pages.

Never link to index.html

I guess I need to change this.
Should I make them all
h ttp://www.siteurl.com/ and
h ttp://www.siteurl.com/sub-index/

May I ask what the reason is for "Never link to index.html"?
Thanks again. I hope to get this right, once and for all.

[Robert Charlton]

May I ask what the reason is for "Never link to index.html"?

Here's the clearest simple introductory explanation I've seen on WebmasterWorld, posted by g1smd. I'm including just the first part of his message....

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3492216.htm#msg3495229 [webmasterworld.com]

These four URLs likely all show the same content:
domain.com/
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com/
www.domain.com/index.html

They are treated as four different URLs by search engines, and therefore as four different but identical pages.

That is called Duplicate Content.

If your internal pages link back to /index.html, all your pageRank is channeled there. External sites probably link to www.domain.com/ and their Pagerank is channeled to that URL.

With split Pagerank, both pages are not as strong as they otherwise would have been.

Additionally, Google does not want to list the same content multiple times. They will pick one to list and hide the other, or else drop it into the Supplemental Index.

They usually favour listing the shorter URL, like www.domain.com/ and so that is the one that your website should internally promote too....

I recommend reading all the threads in the canonical issues area of the Duplicate Content section posted in Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page, as there are many more nuances and side-issues to be described. Others are welcome to jump in and discuss them here.

[buckworks]

what the reason is for "Never link to index.html

There's more than one reason why that's best practice.

SEO-wise, you want to keep your link popularity focused on one URL for each page, not split between variants for the same content. You don't want variant URLs to be getting into circulation if you can help it.

URLs like these might all deliver the same content to the user, but if the search engines will often consider them as separate pages. That does not help your cause.

http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/index.html
http://example.com
http://example.com/
http://example.com/index.html
http://example.com/INDEX.HTML

and so on.

You'll get more SEO mileage out of your link popularity if you pick one URL and use it consistently. Do your best to avoid variations in any links that you control.

Note that you can choose to go either with or without the www. bit. The important thing is to be consistent about it.

Another benefit of keeping index.html out of your URLs is that your URLs stay stable if you ever want to change the technology that drives your site.

You could switch from index.html to index.php (or vice versa) without missing a beat in the search engines.

Another factor, of interest to those who obsess about page loading speed, is that getting the same job done with fewer characters in your source code is usually A Good Thing. Depending how many of your internal links are carrying unnecessary index.html's, you might save dozens or even hundreds of semantically meaningless characters on the average page. What's not to like?

[ColedogUK]

'I would like to correct this, but fear of changing 8-year-old links has stopped me. '
@Sally Stitts

Are you unhappy with your site performance? If you do something different you will get different results, maybe better, maybe worse. If you are happy then don't change anything.

However if you do want more organic search traffic from Google then sorting out canonical issues is recommended. (Matt Cutts' 2006 post is the definitive: [mattcutts.com...]

You don't need to change your links, just 301 redirect versions of the page you dont want to the one you do. The redirects will pass the traffic and consolidate the link juice/ PR to the desired version.

[piatkow]

Note that you can choose to go either with or without the www. bit. The important thing is to be consistent about it.

Most external sites will link to www.example.com even if you tell them that the URL is example.com so unless you are able to set up redirects, and are comfortable doing so, I would suggest sticking to www.

[aristotle]

When I created my first small site 6 years ago, I knew nothing about any of this, and used <a href="index.html">Home</a> for all internal links to my home page. This is a relative link, and it doesn't even have a slash / to designate the root directory. I've never changed this, yet the site has always done very well in Google search, far better than my original expectations. Several of the pages even rank number 1 for their main keyword, just above the corresponding Wikipedia page. It may not be the right way to do it, but I'm not going to take the risk of changing it now.

[piatkow]

I agree that the "duplicate content" issue is more theoretical than practical here. Certainly if your site url is something like mysite.example.com then stick with relative addressing as you might buy your own domain next year.

[netmeg]

FWIW I have gone back over the years and "fixed" a ton of sites (for me and for clients) with this issue - changing all the internal links to example.com/ and remove as many external links to index.html as I could find and convince to change. None of the sites have ever suffered for it, and some have had great gains in organic SERPS (although I certainly wouldn't attribute that to this issue, it obviously didn't hurt) Many of these sites had been in operation for well over ten years.

[Sally Stitts]

Thank you so much everyone for commenting.
It looks like I will be going with the / method throughout, with no exceptions.
And doing a lot more reading.
Special thanks to Robert Charlton for his input and links.

[buckworks]

Most external sites will link to www.example.com even if you tell them that the URL is example.com

FWIW, that has not been my experience.

Well over 90% of my backlinks are without the www.

[netmeg]

My experience is they just lift whatever is in the browser address bar. When we had www, all our incoming links had www. When I removed the www, the links started coming in naked. If your 301s are good and proper, even if they type in www (or click on an old link with www) when they hit the page, the redirect will remove it in the address bar. Or vice versa.

[Sally Stitts]

I have always used www religiously, because -
1 - that is the way I started out in 2003, and
2 - everyone here seems to say that consistancy is the inportant thing
3 - an old semiconductor Phd boss of mine once told me, "It doesn't matter what you do, (myname), as long as you are consistant." That has always stuck in my mind.

HOWEVER, it has been suggested that making these changes MAY have resulted in my most popular page losing canonization in Google - discussion here -
[webmasterworld.com...]

[aristotle]

There must be millions of websites that have this kind of issue. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that Google would have long ago worked out a way to handle it themselves.

[tedster]

In many cases, it "looks like" Google has adapted - but not in all cases. And even when only one version of the URL is in the index, I'm still not certain that link equity is really concentrated on the URL that shows. I see data that makes me doubt it