Help with redirecting from .co.uk/html to .co.uk page

Hi All,

I’ve done a search of the forum and I’m not able to find an answer to my question.

I’ve used freeway to create my friend a website for his business www.tjbrickwork.co.uk. It’s not the greatest of sites I know, but it gives him a web presence that he never had before.

I’m trying to climb the google ranks and I’m using google analytics. On thing that I’ve noticed is that I’m getting a 60/40 split of people (via search) landing on the .co.uk page and the .co.uk/index.html page, and I understand that having the same content on two pages doesn’t help the ranking.

I just want to redirect from the index.html page straight to the .co.uk. I tried a 301 direct, but think I did it wrong as it was creating a constant loop that kept re-loading the home page.

Please could anyone advise the best way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

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An interesting question

You could (in Freeway) make your links to index pages in the External pane in the command-k link panel to omit the index.html

So your external link would be ../

But google will still read the index.html page and perhaps list it?

One option is to change the .htaccess file to include

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
    # change any index.html to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

This will tidy up the URL to remove the index.html off every folder of the site.

Will it help with google? We’re testing this on one of our sites to see it there is any difference. If your read up about canonical URL’s its supposed to help with stopping duplicate content as you mention (I have the gut feeling that Google has this issue already well covered in their algorithms).

David Owen { Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains }

http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk | http://www.PrintlineAdvertising.co.uk

On 8 Sep 2010, at 08:36, A Porter wrote:

Hi All,

I’ve done a search of the forum and I’m not able to find an answer to my question.

I’ve used freeway to create my friend a website for his business www.tjbrickwork.co.uk. It’s not the greatest of sites I know, but it gives him a web presence that he never had before.

I’m trying to climb the google ranks and I’m using google analytics. On thing that I’ve noticed is that I’m getting a 60/40 split of people (via search) landing on the .co.uk page and the .co.uk/index.html page, and I understand that having the same content on two pages doesn’t help the ranking.

I just want to redirect from the index.html page straight to the .co.uk. I tried a 301 direct, but think I did it wrong as it was creating a constant loop that kept re-loading the home page.

Please could anyone advise the best way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

quote

landing on the .co.uk page and the .co.uk/index.html

But surely if you have a standard configured linux/unix server these are actually one and the same as the default ‘starting’ page is index.html (or index.php if there isn’t the other).

What I mean is that if someone types yoursite.co.uk into the browser address bar then the page they will arrive at is yoursite.co.uk/index.html and does GA not just count what was actually requested.

David

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Thanks for the input guys.

David with regards to the .htaccess code, I can get to the file using filezilla and open it as a text document. Does the code you have provided need to be inserted anywhere in particular within that file?

I thought about using the robot.txt file to omit the .co.uk/html page, but was a bit worried that it might actually remove the homepage altogether from the listings.

Thanks again. Andy

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… and sorry just to add to that, when people type in the .co.uk address they do just arrive at .co.uk.

I think somewhere in the google computers the .co.uk/index.html has been index and certain searches are being directed to that page.

Either way, GA is recording two separate results for each page in terms of the number of hits so I’m just trying to close off a potential issue that could affect the rankings.

Best regards

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when people type in the .co.uk address they do just arrive at .co.uk

They actually arrive at the index.html page but because it is the default and they have not specified the /index.html page in the address bar that is what you get.

Still the same page!

There aren’t 2 different pages involved here

D

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