301 Redirect for index.php - only half the job?

[slobjones]

I've been advised by the developer of my sitemap generator to not only institute a 301 Redirect from index.php to the root of my site, but to remove all references to index.php in my blog.

The thought is to remove all redundant references, thus maximizing SEO and making things simpler for Google.
Is this second step advisable, or is the Redirect sufficient?

Thanks.

[wige]

I would go with the suggestion, and change your links to point to the domain root. There are a few reasons. First, you lose the processing overhead of having to process the redirect, and you slightly cut down on bandwidth as a result (browsers only make one request, not two).

Additionally, it may take longer for pagerank to be calculated through a redirect than a direct link. The current theory is that a 301 redirect does not lose page rank, however since the spider has to crawl both the URL containing the link and the page doing the redirection, it may take some time for the two pages to "merge".

Finally, Google has stressed several times that they like consistency. This has been posted both in the Google webmaster forums, the webmaster blog and on Matt Cutts' own blog when he talks about canonicalization issues. For whatever reason, they recommend that you make every effort to link to the target page, not the redirection page.

[slobjones]

Thanks for your helpful reply, wige. But perhaps I should backpedal here and ask if I the redirect is even all that helpful for Google, and, considering all the unanticipated extra work it creates, whether I should just leave my site alone.

Without the redirect, I have one set of links, and my only problem is redundant home page links between mysite.com and mysite.com/index.php.

With the redirect, I have to not just remove all index.php references in the database of my blog, but locate and remove many more in the blog structure files. I'm not sure if this is advisable.

Any further thoughts regarding the value of the redirect?

Thanks.

[wige]

If you don't have the redirect, Google will see two URLs, one at http://yoursite.com/ and another at http://yoursite.com/index.php, both with the same content. This is called canonicalization, where a canonical URL causes the same page to be displayed for multiple URLs. This will result in one variation of the page getting filtered out. When that happens, you lose the benefit of all the links pointing to that page.

By using the redirect, you merge the pagerank of the two different URLs into a single page that all spiders and visitors see.

[chowell]

Originally Posted by slobjones

I've been advised by the developer of my sitemap generator to not only institute a 301 Redirect from index.php to the root of my site, but to remove all references to index.php in my blog.

The thought is to remove all redundant references, thus maximizing SEO and making things simpler for Google.
Is this second step advisable, or is the Redirect sufficient?

Thanks.

I don't believe that you can do a redirect, because you'll create an endless loop for your server. Because "index.php" is the default page within a folder, redirecting the index.php path back to the "/" will only cause it to keep redirecting itself over & over.

What you need to do is try and find out where the "index.php" is being referenced in your blog system/template and modify if to point to the "/" only (removing the index.php from the path).

[wige]

This depends on how the server is configured. If the server is set up to already redirect from / to /index.php, then no you would not want to create the redirect and make an endless loop. However, most servers display the same content for both URLs, with no redirect. In that case, a redirect to one or the other is the recommended strategy.

[slobjones]

Thanks, all. Through testing with the redirect, I've found the "/" character, where necessary, removes any problems. Haven't encountered the "endless loop" situation.

You've explained the issue pretty well, so it's up to me, I suppose, to decide whether to edit my blog structure to remove references to index.php, and create all new links to reflect the change.