Removing index.php

[MedGroupMedia]

I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea.

I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page.  I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all.  Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL?  I've read that it is a bad practice.

I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php.  However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo.  All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL.

Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links?  I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales.  I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file.  But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting.

Any help or advice appreciated.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi, any plugin like sh404SEF will work and accomplish your goal without hurting your rankings as long as it redirects, the index.php URLs to their corresponding without index.php URLs via 301. By the way, you don't need to list all your URLs in .htaccess file to implement this. You can go with pattern match redirection.

Here you go for more:

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/301-redirect-with-mod_rewrite-or-redirectmatch.html

and

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/htaccess-redirect-rewrite-rules.html

By the way, having index.php in URLs does not affect your SEO efforts directly but by stripping index.php from all the URLs will make them look pretty, clean and a bit user friendly.

Hope it helps. Good Luck to you.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

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[JaneCopland]

As Devanur says, this will achieve your goal. It's worth reiterating that there is nothing inherently wrong with /index.php URLs as long as you cannot access the same content without /index.php. For instance, if www.site.com/page1/index.php exists as well as www.site.com/page1/, then this is duplicate content and should be fixed. I imagine this is your current situation because this is most common when /index.php is being added to URLs.

However, if only one version of every page loads and that version has the /index.php extension, this is not automatically bad. It's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness and because this does move the content one folder-level away from the root (not a huge issue, but probably best avoided) however.

If you go through 301 redirects to shift the old URLs to the new ones without /index.php, your rankings should not suffer. There might be a little bit of ranking fluctuation as Google indexes the new URLs and acknowledges the redirects, but nothing permanent. It's worth noting that this is not an absolute rule, however, and that there is always a risk of lowered rankings or rankings not returning to what they were before after a 301 redirect though.

Cheers,

Jane

[MedGroupMedia]

Devanur/Jane,

Thank you for the info.

Dan

[QGS77]

Add this to your htaccess file (remove the .txt extension from the file in order to use it)

Remove index.php or index.htm/html from URL requests

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index.(php|html?)\ HTTP/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator
RewriteRule ^([^/]+/)*index.(html?|php)$ http://your_site_URL/$1 [R=301,L]

Obviously change the your_site_url to the your domain in   http://your_site_URL/$1

Also remove the # before RewriteEngine On to make these changes work.