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URL Canoniclization / Redirects for /index.php

by laurenamy93
9 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi!

I'm working alongside a web developer for the launch of a new website and I'm trying to get the URLs sorted so that /index.php versions of the website redirect to the the normal version. He has said that the /index.php is hidden from the search engines but people can still manually type in /index.php into the URL and it would work.

We are using Magento and apparently this is just because of the way Magento works (as all queries need go through the index.php by design).

He claims this is done this way for "SEO" but my understanding was that canonicilization and redirects were the best practice rather than just hiding the pages from search engines.

My question is, is it enough to just "hide" the /index.php or is it vital to implement the canonicilization and/or redirects?
#canoniclization #or indexphp #redirects #url
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by laurenamy93 View Post

    Hi!

    I'm working alongside a web developer for the launch of a new website and I'm trying to get the URLs sorted so that /index.php versions of the website redirect to the the normal version. He has said that the /index.php is hidden from the search engines but people can still manually type in /index.php into the URL and it would work.

    Wrong.

    If a URL exist & traffic can open the page in a browser I guarantee Google will find the index.php & you'll have duplicate internal pages.

    Do a proper 301 redirect from the index.php URL to your domain.com URL.
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    • Profile picture of the author laurenamy93
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      Wrong.

      If a URL exist & traffic can open the page in a browser I guarantee Google will find the index.php & you'll have duplicate internal pages.

      Do a proper 301 redirect from the index.php URL to your domain.com URL.
      Thank you for your reply, I thought this would be the case but he's putting up a battle and claims that hiding the /index.php is the SEO friendly way to do it!
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by laurenamy93 View Post

        Thank you for your reply, I thought this would be the case but he's putting up a battle and claims that hiding the /index.php is the SEO friendly way to do it!

        You're not hiding a URL from Google. Google will find the URL before traffic does.

        It really is simple, just do a 301 redirect & it's not even an issue.
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    • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      Do a proper 301 redirect from the index.php URL to your domain.com URL.
      That doesn't always work as intended, so at least you've got to be very careful with this. There's several CMSes that rewrite the addresses so that they're hiding the fact that every query actually goes trough index.php.

      If every address is like index.php/something or index.php?p=something I would change that. If your front-page appears in two addresses and you can choose to not use one of them that would be a non-issue to me.

      Originally Posted by laurenamy93 View Post

      He claims this is done this way for "SEO" but my understanding was that canonicilization and redirects were the best practice rather than just hiding the pages from search engines.
      Do you know what canonicalization does? That's practically the same as hiding the duplicate addresses from search engine. Maybe you're talking about the exact same thing.
      Signature
      Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
      Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

      What's your excuse?
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      • Profile picture of the author paulgl
        Your so-called web developer has no clue as to what he is doing.

        99.99% of servers are set to look for an index page.

        There is a hierarchy. Most look for an index.php
        first, then an index.html, etc. As soon as it finds
        one, that's what it loads for the index page.

        Every domain has an index page.It has to.Going to
        a domain loads the index page (or what you might call
        a landing page, but it's not a landing page) It's the
        page that loads when you type in or visit a domain.

        Whether you put it in your browser or not, it's the
        page that loads.

        Type in warriorforum.comor warriorforum.com/index.php

        I do not know what you mean by index page or normal page.

        It's the same thing, depending on what you specify.

        If you think domain.com is the normal and something
        like domain.com/index.php is not normal, that's insane.

        It's the same thing loading.

        You cannot just load a domain. There has to be a page there.

        Your server loads the page specified. Period. Just because you
        don't see index.php or other in your browser, does not mean
        it's not there internally. It is.


        You and your web developer need to actually learn how servers
        and the internet work. If not, you cannot call the fool a web
        developer.

        Some servers are set to need www. or not as well. These are
        not different pages. They all load the same thing. In 2016,
        if your server is set correctly, and most are, you do not need
        to 301 anything. Google is not that dumb. Unless you want
        a different page to load. You can load whatever page you want
        to when someone lands on your domain using a 301 for that.

        Paul
        Signature

        If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

        That doesn't always work as intended, so at least you've got to be very careful with this. There's several CMSes that rewrite the addresses so that they're hiding the fact that every query actually goes trough index.php.

        If every address is like index.php/something or index.php?p=something I would change that. If your front-page appears in two addresses and you can choose to not use one of them that would be a non-issue to me.



        Do you know what canonicalization does? That's practically the same as hiding the duplicate addresses from search engine. Maybe you're talking about the exact same thing.

        The way I understood OP is they're talking about a single static URL.
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        • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
          Originally Posted by yukon View Post

          The way I understood OP is they're talking about a single static URL.
          That's the way I read it too. Just added that other example for perspective... There's these misconfigured sites around that have all the URLs like this: site.tld/index.php/blah/
          Signature
          Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
          Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

          What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author abhishek786
    Google will consider it different URLs and you need to properly define each and every other URL by adding 301 Permanent redirect.
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  • Profile picture of the author arpitamishra
    Its pretty simple OP. If the link is working fine by entering it in the search bar, it means that the page is still live. It should be indexed by Google as well. A 301 redirect would work fine if you dont want to index it.
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