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Extension on URL a problem

by sydneypm
6 replies
I am trying a "site building" and hosting service and have run into a potential issue.

I bought the domain as a dot com. I have been linking to it as a dot com. Today I did a search on my site and found that there is a /index.php extension added to the home page.

I believe this is causing high PR links to not be noticed as well as many other links. But, I don't know how to fix it. I am trying to contact the webmasters of 3 high PR blogs I have links on to see if they can can add that extension to my links, not sure if they will. I also have used an html to rss service with Feedage and used the dot com (not the dot com/index.php).

Does anyone know how bad this is as far as linking?

EDIT - I'm pretty sure I cannot do a redirect since it is on a sitebuilder - I have put a request for them to do it. Hopefully that will fix this, not sure if there are any other solutions than what I have already done.

Sincerely,
Cindy P.
#extension #problem #url
  • Profile picture of the author SteveJohnson
    I'm not understanding what your issue is, or what you think it is...

    It's not necessary to add 'index.php' to links, unless index.php is not your true index file. If your actual index file has another name (like index.html) then you might have an issue.

    EDIT:

    You mention a redirect...redirect from WHERE to WHERE?

    Is it possible that you don't understand fully how a web server works, i.e. which file is served when a bare domain is requested? If not, I'll try to explain, but I'm not going to type it out unless you need it...
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    • Profile picture of the author sydneypm
      I bought the domain as a dot com. I have been linking to it as a dot com. Today I did a search on my site and found that there is a /index.php extension added to the home page.
      As I wrote - I did not add the extension, the sitebuilder did. According to Google Webmaster Central, the is a "canonical issue" as the homepage has 2 urls (one is www.domain name.com and one is www.domain name.com/index.php), and I should do a 301 redirect from the /index.php to the .com. I cannot do this because I cannot create the .htacess file necessary because the site is on a sitebuilder and not my machine.

      So, my question is... will this create a problem in my linking because I have been linking only to .com while Google has the site indexed as .com/index.php (I did not realize this site builder was adding the index extension.)

      Is it possible that you don't understand fully how a web server works, i.e. which file is served when a bare domain is requested?
      Yes - this is true!
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  • Profile picture of the author SteveJohnson
    OK, I see where you're coming from...

    #1 - accepted linking practice, when linking to a 'home' page, is to use the bare domain with a trailing slash, i.e.
    Code:
    http://mydomain.com/
    or
    Code:
    http://www.mydomain.com/
    .

    #2 - it is beneficial, some people think, to redirect requests for the full index page address ( domain.com/default.html, domain.com/index.html, domain.com/index.php, etc. ) with a permanent redirect to the bare trailing-slashed domain name.

    #3 - no, you shouldn't encourage people to link to the actual index page URL. You don't want to encourage that.

    That said, if you're not able to do htaccess redirects, there's not a whole lot you can do at this point.

    Now the question becomes: if this site is important to you, and SERPs are important, wouldn't it be beneficial to move away from the sitebuilder thing toward a method where you have a little more control?

    Aside: a web server in a nutshell.
    A simple straight html web site is made up of individual html files, each representing a 'page' of your site. When someone clicks a link to a specific page of your site ( domain.com/thispage.html ), the web server gets the request for the specific page, retrieves it, and serves it up.

    When the bare domain is requested ( google.com ), the web server looks through its hierarchical list of index page file names, then serves the first one it finds. So - your server has this list of index files, in this order:

    home.htm
    home.html
    default.htm
    default.html
    index.htm
    index.html
    index.php

    When it receives a request for domain.com/, it goes looking for a file matching the first file name on the list. If there isn't one, it looks for the second, and so on, until it finds one that matches.
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    • Profile picture of the author sydneypm
      Steve, thank you very much for taking your time to write that out for me. I do know bits and pieces and your info helps me organize in my head to make sense. I appreciate that.

      As for using the Sitebuilder, the site is important to me for a couple months only. No - I will not be using it (or any other site builder) again... not enough control of the site for me. As for this site, I requested a tech of the site building co. to do the redirect for me if possible. If not, I guess it is another lesson learned "the hard way."

      Thank you, again!

      Cindy P.
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      • Profile picture of the author Eddieheli
        Cindy,
        Why do you think you have a problem?

        If you have a link to yourdomain.com and your site has index.php as the home page then any link to yourdomain.com will go to your homepage anyway.

        Maybe your site is set up as a wordpress site which puts index.php on the site.

        Try typing in yourdomain.com/index.php and yourdomain.com and you should end up in the same place anyway.

        If you don't then you have a problem.

        Regards
        Eddie Evans
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  • Profile picture of the author SteveJohnson
    Wrapped up under this discussion is a good example of why you should use href="/" in your internal links when you're linking to your home page, unless you want to deal with Google and the canonical page issue. The big G sees the "/" as a link to "mydomain.com/", which is what you want.
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