Thread

Hello,

I just wanted to know the positive and negatives associated with removing the index.php from the URL. Which ways work better and why and which ways cause problems (301 errs), etc… How necessary is this step to you, does it help with SEO?

thanks

This has probably been discussed in other threads but is a good question to separate out. My general impression (right or wrong) has been that it’s simply a URL fashion statement.

I’m with PXLated- it doesn’t make much difference aside from personal preference.  I’m sure others will disagree, though.  That said- I almost always remove it because I think it’s ugly.

Also- shifting this up to ‘General Discussion’- it’s a better fit and may generate more discussion there.

I’ve gone from a remover to a renamer myself (i.e. change ‘index’ to a word that means something to the site, and drop the ‘.php’).  With many sites, the added opportunity to provide semantic meaning to your links can help.  On the scale of things, though, it’s fairly insignificant.  You definitely do not get punished by search engines for leaving index.php in your URLs.

now Im not a SEO expert, but i do stay up to date with whats ranking and take notes of little things. One thig i have been noticing is for particular keywords, the ones getting on the first page of google all have that keyword somewhere in their url. Now I also noticed that the closser to the http:// that those keywords appear, the better the ranking, in particular, subdomains http://my-keyword.mywebsite.com/my-keyword-again/etc...
So, Im kindof leaning towards removing the index.php or better yet renaming it like Derek mentioned above. I also woudl love to use alot of subdomains, but thats going to require me to buy a bunch of extra EE licenses as I think the multi site licesnse only includes 3 sites. Is there a way we can use many subdomains without taking having to buy the multi site extension?

Also whats the best way to remove or rename the index.php? I read somewhere that the .htaccess way actually produces some 301 or 401 error codes which are not good when your using google sitemaps.