Index Page Redirect to Home Page? Best Practices...

[Stew222]

Hi,

I am wondering what the best practice is when a site has an index page and a home page?

I have two pages, listed below, and want to know if I should 301 redirect my "index" page to my standard home page.  The home page is where I would like all traffic to fall on for our website.  Additionally, I used the rel=canonical tag years ago on the index page to indicate that the home page is the main content.

Home Page - https://www.1099pro.com/ (PA 45)

• Home Page Canonical:  rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/>

Index Page - https://www.1099pro.com/index.asp (PA - 33)

• Index Page Canonical:  rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/>

It seems to me that there is some extra juice that could be passed to my home page (which is the page that ranks highly for our major keywords) by 301 redirecting the index page.  Is there any reason why I should not do that?

Really appreciate any help - especially with extra explanations - for the simple minded like me ;)!

-Michael

[GastonRiera]

Hi Michael,

SEO Text book and best practices, if there are any, say that whenever there are multiple pages that serve the same content ,and you acknowledge that only one of them is critical: redirect other pages to the primary. Thinking like this: redirect /index.asp to the root page.

Just for the sake of clearing a little about the "there is some extra juice": Analyzing both pages through Moz's or any other private metric could lead you to wrong conclusions. Here, Moz creates its metrics with an algorithm taking into account links and some other magic.  Here some information about Moz's Page Authority
Thinking like that, its perfectly normal that some other page gets more links and have different PA, even though being canonicals of each other. It also reinforces the idea that it should be redirected.

On a side note, Google publicly said that doesn't use metrics like Moz's to rank a website/page. Just having a canonical is almost enough to transfer its authority.

Hope it helps.
Best luck
Gaston