Home Page URL without "/index.html"

[33043]

Is there a way to change the Home Page URL of a MUSE website so that "/index.html" does not appear after the .com?

I'm concerned that Google will interpret our home page as a duplicate page.

Thanks for your help in advance!

[Brad Lawryk]

It should not display the file name if you just go to the domain, however if you click on the home button or whatever it goes to index.html. You should be able to get around that by changing the link in your menu for the home page to just '/' (no quotes of course)

Edit: Looks like that will only work with manual menus

Message was edited by: Brad Lawryk

[33043]

Brad Lawryk,

That sounds like a really smart workaround.

Thank you for the terrific advice even though means I'll be rebuilding the nav menu manually. The auto menu is a little balky anyhow.

[DanfuMlbye]

I am having a similar problem.

I ran a check with SEO Moz and there are two duplicate home pages on my website - one being index. This is affected my SEO as it sees a duplicate content page and name.

How do I remove the index one.

When I look at the page properties it has index as the name and this cannot be changed.

[33043]

DanfuMlbye,

Yes. I agree. This is a serious flaw in the structure of all Muse sites in terms of SEO. Sadly no response from the Adobe team on this. Perhaps they don't realize that we really do care that "duplicate pages" damage our client sites' rankings.

As noted above by Brad Lawryk, it can be remedied by rebuilding the navigation menus by hand. This is an extremely time-consuming fix for sites that have lots of pages.

Adobe: Please please please fix this or respond as this affects all Muse sites.

Thank you.

[33043]

It's been 8 months since I first asked about the flaw in the Muse structure -- all sites contain "duplicate pages" for the home page seriously diluting the SEO for that page. We are all hoping for a simpler and better fix than having to build all the navigation by hand or a really clever workaround. As DanfuMlbye noted above, it's hugely time-consuming for larger sites.

Anything happening on this, Adobe staff?

Thank you for any and all help.

[hushbeck · Accepted solution]

In terms of getting friendly URLs, there are many server side ways to do this. Most servers on the web are Apache, and, if you feel brave, you can read up on .htaccess files to do redirects to more friendly URLs. They are complicated, and not for the coding faint of heart, so be careful. Note, though, that URLs created by Muse cannot take advantage of these friendly URLs automatically, and links would need to be manually pointed to the right place through the hyperlinks drop down.

However, let's talk about the root fear here: SEO. Having index.html on the links is not known to have any negative impact on your site's SEO. There is no official source from either Google or Microsoft on the topic that states anything solid on the topic. Both do have information regarding duplicate content, and Google comes the closest to actually making a comment by stating that links should be consistent. When using Muse's page linking functionality, we will output all links to be consistent everywhere in your site, and as such, will comply with Google's SEO guidelines in this regard.

In regards to duplicate content, the filename index.html is a special filename for websites and webservers and is the default page name on most servers. Servers with server-side languages and with other configurations like the one I mentioned above can have different names, but this is the most common by far. Without extra configuration, your server will serve both index.html and / as the same page regardless of wether or not it is a Muse site. Google and Bing, in our experience, are smart enough to merge the two files without any trouble, but the proof is in the pudding, as they say. There is a simple test you can use to check and make sure they are doing the proper thing. If you would like to verify that there are not duplicate results in the search, simply go to Google or Bing and search for "site:http://www.mydomain.com Home" without quotes. Just replace your domain name in there, and search for your homepage title, and you should see your homepage listed. In every Muse site I checked (just pulling ones at random form the site of the day) there was only 1 listing for the homepage, indicating there was no confusion by the search engines. If you'd like to clarify or check things further, you can always use Google's WebMaster Tools to take additional actions in informing Google about your site.

We care about the SEO of your sites and do our best to ensure that things we can do automatically, we try and cover for you. We are always making improvements in every area of our code, and this is one area in particular we know you all are passionate about. Unfortunately, the area of SEO has a lot of misinformation, misunderstandings, and unknowns that spread very quickly and will get adopted without a real understanding. In addition to doing our best to comply to good SEO practices, we also do our best to make sure we're not filling your sites with false remedies and cheap tricks that don't quite work. When we look at new features, we think about their impact on your sites, on SEO, and on what we can do to improve both your and your website visitor's experience. For example, when we added mobile and tablet layouts, we also added canonical and alternate meta tags to your pages so that search engines knew about the duplicate content, and also knew where and when to redirect users. And as new things come out, we'll continue to do our best to have the same amount of due diligence in ensuring you rank as high as possible for your searches. And we'll continue to examine areas where we could use improvement, and do our best to make them whenever we can.

Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

Andrew Hushbeck

Muse QE

[DanfuMlbye]

The reason I raised this is that I use SEO moz seo tool and it highlighted two pages wiht duplicate content that was affected my SEO ranking. index and /

This seems to be to show that there is a problem with this.

[hushbeck]

Hi DanfuMlbye,

Tools like SEOMoz can help point you in the right direction for identifying issues, but can also be misleading sometimes. When you see problems listed by tools like that, it is usually best to check with a quick search in Google or using Google's Webmaster Tools to verify the issue before spending too much time trying to track down a fix. Have you run the search I suggested in my post, and do you see more than 1 result for your homepage?

[33043]

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for your in-depth response and the reassurance that Adobe Muse cares about page rank. However, I'm still puzzled about having two page names for the home page, and the effect that has on page rank.

Since the SEO pros that I work with apparently don't agree with you, it would be great to be able to simply delete the index.html so there is only one home page name. Can you confirm that the way to do that is to build the menus manually?

And if so, can you point us to instructions that show how to do this yet keeping a manual drop-down menu option? The brief tutorial provided for first-time Muse users doesn't completely address this. Is this even possible? If so, are there complete instructions for this?

Have you seen this discussion and the reply from staff member, Zak that is related to this?

http://forums.adobe.com/message/6338705#6338705

Thank you so much for your help and expertise! Muse just keeps getting better and better.

Ellen

[hushbeck]

Hi Ellen,

I did see that discussion. Zak is the one who pointed out this thread, as well as the other, and asked if I would take a look.

As I said before, we do not now, nor have we ever seen, any SEO hit or double indexing occurring on Google or Bing with the links the way they are. If you are seeing a site where the homepage is being double indexed, please let us know the URL, and we will investigate further. However, if you would still prefer to not have index.html  there is a simpler way of doing so rather than building your menus manually. If you go to your site plan, you can right click (or Control+Click on Mac) on the homepage, and select "Menu Options > Include Page without Hyperlink". Then you will need to go to your menu, and select the Home menu item, and assign it a hyperlink. I would recommend "./" so that it will always go to the index page of the current site (phone, tablet, desktop, or subfolder). I've attached some example screenshots.

Note, that because of Google's recommendation against links to both ./ and index.html, if you want to make sure to not take an SEO hit with this change, you will need to make sure all links point to ./ instead of index.html.

Again, just to sound like a broken record, we have no indication this is necessary for SEO. However, this method of doing this should be easier and allow Muse to still use automatic menus for your sites if you would prefer this behavior.

Hope that helps,

Andrew

[33043]

Hi Andrew,

Thank you so much for your excellent help with this issue and for the excellent instructions above. Bravo!

Ellen

[33043]

Hello Andrew Hushbeck,

We followed the above directions and it seemed like a great solution. However, the index.html version of the home page still populates when we type it in with it included. Is there any other way to get rid of it? The site uses master pages with the navigation included on them. So we applied the changes you recommended above to every master page. So I'm puzzled why the page with the index.html still seems to exist.

My SEO team has cited several sources that claim the way Muse handles this doesn't comply with SEO best practices and we are concerned about duplicate pages still. Do you have any idea how to delete the index URL completely for the home page. I'm at an impasse.

Thanks in advance for your expert advice. I look forward to your reply.

Ellen

[The Paramount Group]

Andrew,

I realize that this is an older thread, but we have just discovered the same issue with our Adobe partner site. We are Google Partners and SEO is part of our business. Google Webmaster Tools indicates that we have duplicate content and two home pages, one with "theparamountgroup.us" and one that is "theparamountgroup.us/index.html". They each have different page rank and this is affecting our overall optimization. Any word on if there is a fix for this?

[dmitryv21589366]

Hello,

I too wish to get rid of the duplicates of / and /index.html. The solution suggested by Andrew Hushbeck on Apr 29, 2014 is now more than 1 year old. Can someone please confirm that it's still the current fix? I'm not a professional, but from already 3 professional SEO's I've heard that duplicates are not good for SEO.

Thank you.

[The Paramount Group]

Hello dmitry,

We found the answer on moz.com here is the link to the article:  Duplicate Content - SEO Best Practices - Moz

The 301 redirect would not work so we went with the rel="canonical" option to fix the duplicate content. I like to think of it as consolidating all my links to one URL.

sample: <link href="http://www.example.com/canonical-version-of-page/" rel="canonical" />

Here is the line of code that we use, placed in the head section of the website.

<link href="http://www.theparamountgroup.us" rel="canonical">

[The Paramount Group]

That is only on the homepage. Not on the master page.

[donavonw98130882]

My website is still doing it. I have had the conical in there since the beginning.

Please help. Used Alexa and it's splitting them.

www.isobrain.com

[DimitrisGR]

Muse works excellent with SEO. I have at least 10 web sites in first place on Google and they haven't problems with duplicate pages.

Because you haven't declare which site you will use on 'Google Developers Console'.

You have Canonical more than 2 times in your page with http:// version and https:// version.

Fix your canonical and decide which version you wanna use.

Also you will have to fix your .htaccess file with 301 permanent redirect.

Regards

[Clement_buffle]

Hey DimitrisGR​

Thanks a lot for your explanations

I am a not so good with the Google Developers Console.

I already registered my website, indicate my sitemap.xml.

Have you any idea about the process to fix my canonical ?

In my case it's the https:// version that I want to use.

Also for the 301 permanent redirections, can you please give me a link to process with my .htaccess ?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Clément.

[DimitrisGR]

Add this on .htaccess  for 301 permanent redirect

----------------------------------------------------------------------

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on

RewriteRule (.*) https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R,L]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

After that anyone where will type your site name will go on 'https://www.yourdomain.com'

If you will prefer non www change it like:

RewriteRule (.*) https://yourdomain.com/$1 [R,L]

Then go to webmaster tools, include the 2 https sites, (https://www.yourdomain.com and https://yourdomain.com)

Click on Gear and select 'Site Settings'

On preferred domain select 'Display URLs as...' the preferred URL you want

After that check all Canonical URL's from your site to be the same like your adjustments!

Regards

[Clement_buffle]

Thanks a lot DimitrisGR​

That's worked perfectly for me concerning the https redirection !   everything goes now on the https://. website.

But for the index.html page, it's still here... is there a way to solve it throw the .htaccess file also ?

Thank you again,

Clément.

[DimitrisGR]

If you fixed everything, submit your sitemap on Google and be patient. Maybe you must wait 6 months till Google re-index your site.

Keep in mind also... Google is very 'Intelligence'... <<https://www.yourdomain.com>> or <<https://www.yourdomain.com/​index.html>> don't effect your SEO... All these are rumors and nothing more.

[WCT_Leslie]

Hi Dimitri. I was just told by an SEO expert that one of the biggest problems with my site is that when someone logs on its to example.com, but when they enter the site then go back to the landing page its example.com/index.html and that google can't get an accurate read because it sees it as two different sites. Can you recommend any good articles on this subject, or really anything SEO related for the novice?

[DimitrisGR]

How can someone can be expert when Google does announce nothing about SEO... Anyway. You can use something like this and declare which version of page you prefer. For example:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/index.html" />

And that all.

About 'Good Articles'... I think only this one can help you:

Follow our guidelines - Search Console Help

Regards