Which Home Page Do I Choose?

We’ve all see them, but if you don’t pay careful attention, you might be missing something that’s VERY obvious:

FAIL = ( (.com/)  ==  (.com/home.html)  ==  (.com/index.php)  ==  (.com/default.aspx) );

That’s the coding tech-ness in me saying that there are multiple ways to find the home page of some sites.  I’ve seen as many as 4 different methods to display the home page URL in a browser.

But, but, but, but, but why is that bad?

I’ll tell you – would you like to have to take 4 different routes home from the store?  Or would you like to have 1 method that’s the most direct that’s always available?  I thought so, so if you’re serving a slew of URL versions to get to the home page, you’re giving Google/Yahoo/MSN a pain in the woo-ha.  And that’s bad for SEO, mmmmkay?

The solution(s):

1. Always link your on-site home page link in your navigation to <a href=”/”>Home<a/> and any other link to the home page on your site. What that does is sends a user or bot to the home page, the same way as if someone enters the URL in a browser – the “/” is mucho importante.  And since search bots are basically really smart text-based browsers, you’re speaking their Love Language.
2. Never link internally, or externally, to anything other than “http://www.sitename.com” – if your canonical domain is www.sitename.com.  If you’ve got links on your site to .com/index.html – and that displays the same content as .com/ – then guess what, you’re serving multiple versions of the same page and same content on your site.  That’s a no-no.  If you can update inbound links that are hitched up to index.html or default.php, I’d suggest updating them to your ideal location as well.
3. 301 Redirect all requests for any currently live version of your home page, to one method of viewing your home page URL – preferably “/” And do this ASAP.  Depending on the operating system of your server, you might need to make an IIS update or .htaccess update or scripting update to the code that generates your pages.  A little Googling and you should be good to go.

There.  Those are some reasons and strategies to get you thinking about not serving a sack of routes to your home page.  Your users will thank you and the search bots will to.