Domain.com/ redirecting to domain/index.php - SEO issue?

Marketing
1

Looking at our ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ tool in GWMT, it shows that our home page www.domain.com returns a 301 redirect to www.domain.com/index.php.

This redirect is not present in our htaccess file so can only assume it’s something to do with the way the hosting is set up.

I don’t have a massive problem with this, but it has been noted that 301s don’t pass on link juice and as most of the links to our site are to www.domain.com, if this something we should get changed so that the /index.php page redirects to the main domain?

Any advice is much appreciated.

Thanks

2

Thanks for all your responses.

I finally found the issue. There was a redirect from a really old home page with a .htm extension buried deep inside the htaccess file. Removing this has solved the issue in the fetch as googlebot tool, but obviously, we have no redirect in place. As the new home page is five years old and the old page only had a handful of links, I think it’ll be ok, but I’ll be monitoring our 404 errors to make sure no one still links to the domain with the old home page extension.

Thanks again

3

The reduction in link juice is to stop people building up a “positive feedback loop” whereby the googley goodness is passed round a closed circle of pages feeding off each other and giving nothing back. That’s a whole other wotsit to redirecting one single URL to another single URL, particularly for something as basic as / to /index.php, which is a perfectly normal thing to want to do.

4

As i said in the previous post - “Sorry, I should clarify - 301s don’t pass on as much link juice”.

The article confirms that there is a loss of PR with 301s which suggests it’s the links that are being devalued.

Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301

If you can confirm that this is not the case, that’s great.

My issue here is the Fetch as Googlebot tool and whether what I’m seeing (the 301 from domain.com to domain.com/index.php) is normal and nothing to worry about.

Anyone else had this experience with this tool?

5

let’s quote from there then:

Matt Cutts: Typically, the 301 Redirect would pass PageRank.

just in case, PageRank = link juice at Google.

again, where did you get the idea that 301 redirects don’t pass on link juice?

6

I understand this part - it makes complete sense. Just don’t understand why Googlebot sees the domain.com as a 301 (I’m not too technical when it comes to server stuff).

Any ideas?

7

Thanks for reply.

Sorry, I should clarify - 301s don’t pass on as much link juice - I got the info from Matt Cutts http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

There seems to be quite a lot about this online. Think it’s partly due to 301s being exploited and used for black hat SEO tactics.

8

also, I should add, index.php is your main domain, i.e. that is what is being called when you call your domain, a file has to be called, and in most cases this file is index.php. Redirecting from index.php to domain.com would result in an infinite loop.

9

first of all, welcome to Sitepoint!

secondly, who is saying 301 redirects don’t pass on link juice? please provide a source for such claims, there’s enough misinformation being spread around SEO as it is already.

10

If you put
DirectoryIndex index.php
in .htaccess, this sets the default page as “index.php” for anyone going to the directory without putting a filename on the end. I don’t think that counts as a 301 redirect.