What's Your Home Page URL?

This simple question may not be as simple as it sounds. Your answer is probably something like "http://www.mysite.com/". But if you take a good look at the links to the home page on your website, you may find a different answer.

The problem is that, while most inbound links to your site probably use the correct form (above), your own navigation system may not. The filename of your home page is probably something like "index.html" or "index.asp" or "index.asp" or "index.cfm". Try a sitewide search for your home page filename and see how often it occurs. If it occurs AT ALL, you probably need to make some changes.

You see, there is a BIG difference between:

http://www.mysite.com/

and

http://www.mysite.com/index.html

The search engines (at least the less sophisticated ones) treat these as two completely different pages. This can have an undesired effect that can actually cause your rankings to be lower than they should be.

The problem is that you are essentially providing the same content at two different pages. It may be considered duplicate content -- not a good thing.

There are a couple of ways that this can be fixed:

1. Go through your website and change all of the home page links that you have from "/index.html" (for example) to just "/". This will effectively change each of your own home page links to the desired "http://www.mysite.com/".
2. Have your webmaster set up a permanent redirect from "http://www.mysite.com/index.html" to http://www.mysite.com/" for you. This can be done relatively simply, and the method depends upon the type of web server hosting your site.

The same process should be followed for links that you may have to other pages in your site. You may be linking to the same page with http://www.mysite.com/categories" as with http://www.mysite.com/categories/categories.html". If so, then a similar strategy should be followed.

Is this really worth the trouble? You bet! We recently made these changes on two client sites. For one, the Google ranking went from #12 to #5; for the other, from #28 to #12. No other changes were made to these sites during the period in which the ranking changes occurred.

So clean up those links and enjoy the higher rankings that may result!