How Many Homepages Do you Have?

If you want to get the very best out of your SEO marketing efforts, it is imperative that you have ONLY ONE HOMEPAGE.

I see this time and time again with new clients and all over the Internet… websites with multiple homepages addresses.  Besides skirting the duplicate content line, you are forcing the search engines to index multiple copies of your most important page.  To be clear… below are examples of multiple homepage url’s:

• http://yourdomain.com
• http://yourdomain.com/
• https://yourdomain.com
• http://www.yourdomain.com
• https://www.yourdomain.com
• http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html
• http://yourdomain.com/index.html
• http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php

Are you starting to get the picture? 

Notice the http or https, www or no www, / or no /, index.html or index.php.

What commonly happens when link building is other sites will link to anyone of your homepage url’s… and if your site gets a link to the index.html page, then it is the index.html page that receives all the benefit.  Then the search engine is forced to pick which homepage url is the strongest! 

If you want to rank well you need to be consistant. 

1. Pick one homepage address, and 301 redirect all other variations to that chosen homepage.  I always use http://www.yourdomain.com/. 
2. Put No Follow, No Index robot tags on all secure pages if you have them.  These are the https pages that are commonly used for ecommerce sites.  The https means the page is secure and are necessary when using secure certificates.
3. 301 redirect all non www pages to pages with the www in them.  If you prefer not to use the www pages then that is fine… but be consistent!
4. 301 redirect all index.html or index.php pages to your chosen homepage, and make sure you do not have any links on your site pointing to these pages anymore.
5. 301 redirect all pages that do not end in a / to pages that end in a /.  I know this seems insignificant… but a page with or without a slash are different pages.  Be consistent.

How do I 301 redirect these pages?

It is actually a pretty simple process for any web developer, programmer, or SEO.  I use Apache servers so this is all taken care of in the htaccess file of my sites.  I suggest consulting your web designer or a professional to do this for you.  It is well worth it.

When all is said and done… the search engines should have only one indexed/cached page of every page in your site.  Including the most important page of your site, the homepage. 

This is a huge ingredient of long term success on the Internet.