Is it ok to point internal links to index.html home page rather than full www

[Twinbytes]

I thought I saw this somewhere on SEOmoz before but I was so busy by the time I got around to work on my SEO on my site, I realized I have this happening and can't recall if it is a problem which takes away from my ranking.

If my www.website.com is ranking well but I have internal menu links pointing to www.website.com/index.html instead of www.website.com will that take away from my www.website.com rankings?

Should I change all my menu links that point to /index.html to the full website url path www.website.com ?

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, you definitely should and when you do that, make sure you do a redirect from www.website.com/index.html to www.website.com You could do that via .htaccess RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Ideally, it's best not to have the index.html showing up as well - could be a problem of duplicate content. So I would recommend correcting your internal links to point to www.website.com without the index.html. Generally, you should set up the server so that it strips out the index.html and 301 redirects to the clean domain. However, if you need to keep the index.html live and can't redirect it, at the very least I'd make sure to use a canonical tag on the page pointing to the clean version of the page, www.website.com.

Let me know if you need me to elaborate further.

Mark

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Nakul didn't specify, but the code he gave you is if your site is running on an apache server. Make sure to work with your developers to deal with these issues, and don't try changing your htaccess file on your own - you make major problems for your site very easily.

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, that's right. Thanks Mark for specifying that .htaccess will only work if you are Apache based.

[Twinbytes]

Thanks.  You answered my main question.  One other question then from that.  How can I remove the index.html file from the website but still have the main website load?  I believe the index.html file has to be located somewhere for the main page to know where to look.  Right?  I believe if you go to www.twinbytes.ca which is my website, it really looks at www.twinbytes.ca/index.html anyway to get the information to display.  Would I be correct in saying so?  I understand 90% of this, but this whole index.html for the home page thing is a bit confusing.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Daniel,

I was a bit confused by this - index.html on your site returns a 404 error. I changed the url to index.htm and then it returns the correct information as a 200.

Basically, I'm not saying to delete the page index.htm - that is in fact your default page and what the server will show as your homepage. Nakul and I have just been saying to configure the server to strip out the index.htm from the URL and just show twinbytes.ca. Since your site is in fact on an Apache server, you should be able to use the htaccess info that Nakul gave you. But be careful when changing an htaccess file - you can really mess up your site if you don't do it properly. Be sure to make a backup of the file before making any changes or additions to it.

Even though your file is index.htm, the line in Nakul's code should have you covered due to the regular expression.

Mark

[Twinbytes]

Thanks.  Sorry I meant to say index.htm.  Thanks you both for making this very clear.  I've already created a .htaccess file to fix my twin domain issue, now I just have to modify the .htaccess file to include this code.

The code unfortunately doesn't seem to work when I upload it.  meaning, when I type in my website address including index.htm the display still says index.htm rather than removing that part.  Am I doing something wrong?  Here's what I have currently in my htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www|blog|askdaniel).
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm?\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]

[Dr-Pete]

The 301-redirect that Mark and Nakul discuss is probably your best bet here, but if that's causing you implementation problems, you could use the canonical tag on your home-page (in the section):

That will help sweep up any duplicates. It is best to link consistently to the root version, though (without the "index.htm"). FYI, you've got another weird duplicate in Google's index:

http://www.twinbytes.ca/index_from_mobile.htm

[Mark_Ginsberg]

could it not be working because you used rewriteengine twice?

[Twinbytes]

Well, I tried taking out the 2nd instance of RewriteEngine on but i Just get a 500 error now.  I put it back how it was for now.

Any other ideas?

[Twinbytes]

Thanks.  I was trying a mobile version of the website also at some point.  I will just delete that one for now.

I can try your idea but is forwarding from the page itself still good for SEO?

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Try this - of course take what you need from it - source is here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6059920/removing-index-html-from-url-and-adding-www-with-one-single-301-redirect Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(./)index.html$ [NC] RewriteRule . http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%1 [R=301,NE,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteRule . http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [NE,R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(./)index.html$ [NC] RewriteRule . %1 [R=301,NE,L]

[Twinbytes]

Awesome!  By adding the following code to my .htaccess file, and placing it in my public directory it works.  Didn't work from the root directory which I figured out later.  I think related concerns are solved now.  Now to see how the results show on the next crawl. 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /index.html?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ "/$1" [NC,R=301,NE,L]