301 redirect for home/index page

Milo · #1 (**permalink**) 05-06-2007, 11:58 PM

Hi all,
I wondered if anyone has had experience or comments with redirecting a home/index page. We upgraded our static html website to php environment package (X-cart). This was done just over 6 months ago. Since then, the entry page to the php environment (catalog) has accrued the same PR as my index page. If I was to 301 the index page (mysite.com.au) to mysite.com.au/catalog would I lose the generic ranking the index page has. I don't care about the green bar ranking, just the generic ranking (#5 for the term "wedding invitations" on google .com.au). Currently the catalog does not rank well generically. I was hoping the redirect would put more emphasis (hopefully listed at the same position #5) on the catalog page and this could become my entry page.
Any thoughts are appreciated.

SemAdvance · #2 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 04:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Milo

Hi all,
I wondered if anyone has had experience or comments with redirecting a home/index page. We upgraded our static html website to php environment package (X-cart). This was done just over 6 months ago. Since then, the entry page to the php environment (catalog) has accrued the same PR as my index page. If I was to 301 the index page (mysite.com.au) to mysite.com.au/catalog would I lose the generic ranking the index page has. I don't care about the green bar ranking, just the generic ranking (#5 for the term "wedding invitations" on google .com.au). Currently the catalog does not rank well generically. I was hoping the redirect would put more emphasis (hopefully listed at the same position #5) on the catalog page and this could become my entry page.
Any thoughts are appreciated.

You mentioned going from html to php and I am wondering if in doing so you went to the use of a site wide header file?

This could possibly effect your catalogs rankings issue.

I doubt the redirect would boost the search rankings for the catalog page, if you notice most rankings resolve to the sites index page and where you should place the 301 redirect to gain the most PR value.

Good luck!

saxman1973 · #3 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 04:50 PM

One thing that I am curious about to begin with is X-Cart. If this is like most product carts, I'm going to assume that it already has a redirect from your ROOT folder to another folder with all of you product cart files. If this is the case, adding another redirect is only going to make things much worse. Once search engnies (especially Google) pick up on the redirect, you have already lost some credibility with Google. To add another would be about as bad as having a mirror site on the same server. You should always optimize your home page (index.html, default.asp, and so on) to reflect you most highly regarded keywords and/or keyword phrases. In mmost cases your most important. Use your inner pages to take care of the rest. Finally if I am right about the initial redirect to a product cart folder inside your ROOT folder, I would take your index file from that folder and put it in your ROOT folder and update all of your PHP include tags to redirect to your product cart folder.

I hope this helps. L8r - Saxman

hostBrain · #4 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 04:51 PM

I don't think redirecting a home page to a sub-folder page is ever a good idea. Your home page will always be the most important one and I don't think its very often that the page strength of a home page will get passed onto a sub-folder

minorgod · #5 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 05:05 PM

As a long-time x-cart user myself, I would advise you not to put the redirect in place. X-cart's dynamic pages are very SEO-unfriendly due to the number of header redirects that take place the first time a customer enters your storefront. I'm running an older version, but I don't think they've stopped using the multiple header redirects on the storefront page. Our dynamic x-cart pages have never done very well in any of the engines and I suspect it is for this reason. If you set up a webmaster account at Google and check your sitemaps and spidering stats you should be able to see the x-cart pages that Google has trouble indexing. Unless you can verify that Google is not choking on your dynamic store pages I would nix the redirect idea for now.

Jon-WebsiteCM · #6 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 05:06 PM

We've done a lot of work with x-cart, and created manyx-cart mods and addons, having worked with x-cart daily since 2002.

Usually with our clients we recommend:

1) Move the site to root (not in an x-cart, store, or shop directory, etc.).

2) Install our CDSEO mod (http://www.websitecm.com/x-cart-mods...seo-links.html) for optimum spidering.

3) Requesting a robots.txt from us for use with CDSEO to prevent duplicate content.

4) Put this line in .htaccess to prevent the redirects that x-cart inately uses.

DirectoryIndex home.php index.html index.php index.htm

5) Redirect your old pages to your new CDSEO pages so that your links are not lost/broken.

If your interested in more information, I'd be happy to speak with you, just contact us.

bj · #7 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 06:14 PM

If you were to do this redirect and all of a sudden have totally different content showing up on site entry it could have a disastrous affect on your SERPs.

Everyone in the SEO game advises small and incremental changes with much observation from one change to the next. This is recommended for good reason. You're talking about doing something diametrically opposed to that. I doubt you'll be happy with the result.

curtisj · #8 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 06:16 PM

I would advise you to move your x-cart to the root file as noted above. Seek professional help if you are not capable of this yourself.

However, if there are good reasons for to keep your x-cart in a sub folder there is another route you could take. Keep everything where it is at, but build your index.html page to mirror the design of your x-cart and use static links and images to send customers and SEs deep into your x-cart. This way you can use the static pages for SEO and send your customers to your cart to buy.

Milo · #9 (**permalink**) 05-07-2007, 11:19 PM

Thanks for the input gang.
The main reason for having a redirect was that the php (catalog) part of the site has dynamic features with login, cart details, newsletter subscription, while the index (html) page is purely static (Sorry, didn't mean to focus on the pagerank/generic rank issue, I just thought as they were both ranking the same, now would be a good time for an implementation). I have already linked to all the php pages from the index page, but am unable to manually put the dynamic parts on this page (login, cart details, newsletter subscription). I definately don't want to run a risk of confusing the algo's so I'll definately not go ahead with a 301. I think the main objective was to make the entry page EXACTLY the same as the catalog page (looking, not the text).
P.S. Jon-WebsiteCM- I have already implemented DSEFU, but are interested in a few other mods you have available, will contact you via your website.

thedark · #10 (**permalink**) 05-08-2007, 02:36 AM

just 2 cents extra.

i've seen a mod for x-cart, which allowed placing their static html catalogue into web root. i believe either the producers or developers on their forums should still have it.

with this mod and robots.txt closing the dynamic part you'd have a plain html catalogue, which i trust goog appreciates.

Jon-WebsiteCM · #11 (**permalink**) 05-08-2007, 03:06 AM

The problem is you have your entire store in the "catalog" folder. I assume you did this to try and retain the links when you moved from the html catalog to DSEFU.

Instead, move it back to the root directory by doing the following:

1. Log into your admin section and move your images location from the file system, to the database.

2. Transfer all your files out of the "catalog" directory, into your root directory. Ensure there is no index.html in this root directory.

3. Open config.php and find:

Code:

$xcart_web_dir ="/xcart";

Remove /xcart so it looks like:

Code:

$xcart_web_dir ="";

4. Log back into your admin section, and move your images location from the database back to the file system.

Then redirect your old links using this code in an .htaccess file [will also ensure that your domain always uses the www] (substitute yourdomain.com):

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You also need to ensure that home.php is loaded when the domain is loaded, since there is no index.html, and as by default x-cart tries to do a redirect from index.php to home.php (which isn't even a 301 redirect). You can do this with this code in .htaccess:

Code:

DirectoryIndex home.php index.html index.php index.htm

I'll address your ticket with us during business hours tomorrow.

bj · #12 (**permalink**) 05-08-2007, 11:53 AM

I admit to not being familiar with X-Cart, but most good quality carts have an rss feed of some sort. Rather than redirecting or changing things in a major way, with the possibility of a SERP drop, why don't you research a way to use magpie or one of the other rss tools to pull stuff from your cart into your static homepage? It would seem to give you the best of both worlds, since then it wouldn't require updating of the now not so static homepage, it would be refreshed automatically.

And if you then need to run php code in your otherwise static homepage you'll also need to do some htaccess magic to allow php code to run in a file with an htm(l) extension so you don't change the filename (and take a SERP hit.)

Anyway, it's just a thought.

Milo · #13 (**permalink**) 05-08-2007, 11:13 PM

O.K. I think the point here is its not advisable to redirect the index page to a dynamic page and get a better result. The X-cart issues are a side note, but thanks for all the help and input guys.
Warm regards.

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