Homepage 301 and SEO Help

[b4cab]

Hi All,

Does redirecting alternate versions of my homepage with a 301 only improve reporting, or are there SEO benefits as well. We recently changed over our servers and this wasn't set-up as before and I've noticed a drop in our organic search traffic. i.e. there was no 301 sending mywebsite.com traffic to www.mywebsite.com

Thanks in advance for any comments or help.

[MoosaHemani]

It is very important redirect all the alternate versions of your home page to be permanently redirect to the preferred version of the home page. Search Engines ideally consider unique URLs to be a separate page on the website and if two different URLs contain the same content that will be considered as duplicate content which actually can hurt your SERP rankings.

For example:

-          http://www.example.com/xyz -          http://www.example.com.xyz.html

these two URLs are different in the eye of Google and if it displays the same content  that will be considered as duplicate content. In order to stay away from this problem you should set 301 redirects to all alternate versions of your home page.

Hope this helps!

[MickEdwards]

If you have changed servers I would double check a few things.  This is stuff to rule out:

• Page load speed should be good
• All your pages are still indexed in Google
• There are no warnings in Google Webmaster Tools
• Have a look through your link profile - if the majority of links are to non www then the 301s will shave an edge off the link value from those links.  You are right to do the 301, so if this the case see if you can update those links.
• Have you implemented any other internal 301s to new URLs

[b4cab]

Thanks,

Page load is good, pages are indexed, but we did get an error in Google Analytics showing that we needed to 301 our homepage, but when I showed it to them they said it wasn't a big deal!!!!

They've since done the 301, but I think I need to learn to do it myself for next time.

[b4cab]

Cheers, will get our devs on this asap.

[b4cab]

Follow Up:

So, I had our SEO guy do a 301 for both versions of our homepage, and now every single page on our site is showing as duplicate content! Is this just a reporting thing, or do they have no idea what they are doing?

[MickEdwards]

What is the URL?

[b4cab]

www.4cabling.com.au

[MickEdwards]

This is not implemented.  You have both www and non www URLs along with /index.php for the homepage.  This needs to be implemented in your htaccess file with something like (ensure you backup existing file):

Redirect non-www urls to www

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.4cabling.com.au
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.4cabling.com.au/$1 [R=301,L]

Remove index from URL

RewriteRule ^(.*)index.(htm|html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Your page load is woeful and you need to address - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2F4cabling.com.au%2F&tab=desktop

Also, you have not got canonical tags set up for each page which I would recommend

[b4cab]

Thanks Mick, appreciate you taking the time to look at it. I'll get on this asap!

[b4cab]

Hi Mick,

One more question if you don't mind, how would this affect my traffic results? Could this be why my direct is off so much? Or would it show in my organic traffic?

My Direct traffic used to be 3x or 4x by Organic or Paid traffic, now it's barely 1/10th. Cheers.