Is it OK to 301 redirect the index page to a search engine friendly url

[WinningInch]

Is it OK to 301 redirect the index page to a search engine friendly url.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Butler

Why would you want to do that? Surely, you don't want a redirect on your index page? what could be better than http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/ ?

You are really not going to get a search hike from redirecting to
http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/keyword-goes-here.html

There is nothing really that wrong with this, but certainly, if you are doing it purely for a ranking boost, I would not bother and how would this work for internal navigation? Would the homepage links point to this page?

Maybe I am missing something here but as a general overview I see little point in doing this.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

[kyleNeedham]

Hi,

If you mean 301 http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html to http://www.yourdomain.com/ then that would be ok, otherwise your index page would already be the most user friendly URL.

Kyle

[WinningInch]

Hi Marcus,

It occurred to me, when tweaking my page score, that the only item I could not address was the keyword in domain.  The keyword in question we currently rank  3rd..  So I am pondering on the little things and interested in the views of others.

As Kyle states using a 301 it is simple to do and internal nav is not an issue.

Thank you

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, yep, simple for sure, but in this instance, just not the right thing to do.

In an ideal world, if you wrote a piece on big yellow underpants then the page name would include those keywords so...

http://www.yoururl.com/big-yellow-underpants.html

But, for the homepage, this is a special case, you have no page name as such, just the URL itself so in the 99.9% of cases where you don't have the keywords in the URL rewriting the / to a keyword driven page (or vice versa) is just not going to do anything.

This is a tiny thing, don't sweat it!