Home Page URL Question

gobeyond · 05-03-2007, 05:41 PM

Hi,

I inherited a web site that uses welcome.html as the home page. Apparently the web host supports this file as the home page. I am going to transfer this site to another host which DOES NOT support welcome.html as the home page. I will have to change this file name into index.html.

My question is: do I need to do a permanent redirect to tell search engines that the home page is index.html now. I don't want to search engines to index 2 identical pages.

Thanks in advance!

Costin Trifan · 05-04-2007, 12:34 AM

Be aware that if you change the page name you loose everything in Google's eyes...your PR as an example

harmu.com · 05-04-2007, 12:41 AM

that is not all that easy to say, some hosts do accept home or welcome as the homepage, but then others don't!

your domain will remain the same, as the page index.html don't matter all that since the domains gets indexed, and the index.html sometimes don't!

though i would say, make a redirect form the welcome.html to the index.html for a few months, that will help the search engines to get this change properly!

Johan007 · 05-04-2007, 09:26 AM

You really should know this being a professional web design site! Make all links to the homepage "/" then you never ever need to worry about it again. When you click on any link to the homepage all you see is the domain name.

e.g. change the home link on your website to this...

Code:

<a hrfe="/">home</a>

It may not work on your local PC unless you have a web server running but it will work on live.