/index.php/ What is its purpose and does it hurt SEO?

[CamiloSC]

Hello Moz Forum,

I am still in the process of cleaning up the lack of attention to detail and betrayal set by our soon to be ex-SEO company. You can see a previous question I ask regarding betrayal SEO.

I am analyzing every page on our website and i am noticing this /index.php/ in most of our URLs. We want to leave our expression engine cms and convert to wordpress. I have been reading about index.php but most of it is over my head for now. What does concern me is the "layman's" findings i am seeing through analytics. Our main domain has two URLs. one that ends in .com and the other ends in .com/index.php/ The one that ends in .com has a higher page rank than the ladder. And there are other internal pages with the same two variations.

Can someone please explain to me what is /index.php/ ?

what are the benefits of it? what are the cons? What will happen to my site once we move to wordpress?

As always, your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[Francisco_Meza]

This is a server issue. I have known sites that have /index.php in the middle of the URL.  It's either a server issue or an .htaccess issue. It shouldn't be that hard to fix. If you need to get a hold of my programmer, just PM me with your info and he will take care of it.

[Saijo.George]

I have seen IIS servers usually throwing in index.php in the urls ( while working on wordpress sites ) . It's best to talk to your hosting company about it, they will have a good idea why this is the case. Usually you will have to edit the web.config file to rewrite the urls without index.php in them.

Again this would depend a lot on your server configuration and the CMS you are using , best to ask your host.