Index.php canonical/dup issues

[MikeCoughlin]

Hello my fellow SEOs!

I would LOVE some additional insight/opinions on the following...

I have a client who is an industry leader, big site, ranks for many competitive phrases, blah blah..you get the picture.

However, they have a big dup content/canonical issue.  Most pages resolve with and without the /index.php at the end of the URL.  Obviously this is a dup content issue but more importantly they SEs sometimes serve an "index.php" version of the page, sometimes they don't, and it is constantly changing which version it serves and the rank goes up and down.

Now, I've instructed them that we are going to need to write a sitewide redirect to attempt a uniform structure.  Most people would say, redirect to the non index.php version buttttt

1. The index.php pages consistently outperforms the non index.php versions, except the homepage.

2. The client really would prefer to have the "index.php" at the end of the URL

The homepage performs extremely well for a lot of competitive phrases.  I'd like to redirect all pages to the "index.php" version except the homepage and I'm thinking that if I redirect all pages EXCEPT the homepage to the index.php version, it could cause some unforeseen issues.

I can not use rel=canonical because they have many different versions of the their pages with different country codes in the URL..example, if I make the US version canonical, it will hurt the pages trying to rank with a fr URL, de URL, (where fr/de are country codes in the URL depending where the user is, it serves the correct version).

Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated.  Thanks in advance!

Mike

[RyanKent]

Have you checked the backlinks? The only logical reason I can think of for the index.php versions of the URL to outperform the friendly versions is more sites have linked to them.

I would make every effort to convince the client to use friendly URLs. Users clearly prefer them and technologies change. Even if they are using .php today, in a couple years it may be a dead technology and they will have to redirect their entire site. It's not a logical business move.

With the above noted, if you wish to perform the redirect of all pages except the home page to the index.php form of the URL, it is doable with the proper regex expression. The issues I foresee have already been shared:

• URLs are harder to read by users and are therefore less friendly

• URLs are longer so therefore more difficult to share naturally in tweets (for example) without a URL shortening service

• URLs include "php" so when the site's technology changes the URLs will need to be redirected

• Users may experience confusion related to the inconsistent URL formats of the home page and the rest of the site

• Long URLs are cut off. You mentioned using other languages. If a page's title involves foreign characters, those characters are converted in the URL to ?unicode. It is where you see characters like "%20" replace a single character. With foreign URLs the length can often exceed maximums which is an issue. Keeping index.php is an extra 9 characters added to every URL.

This decision approaches the SEO equivalent of a patient going against their doctor's advice. If it was my client, I would want a very firm acknowledgment this decision was against my advice and industry best practices.