« DMOZ Just Won't Die | Main | Increased Site Visibility At Yahoo Leads To 122% Sales Increase »
Future-Proofing Your Site by Resolving at the Folder Root
January 12, 2007
It's become pretty common advice over the last several years to tell site owners to have their home pages resolve at the "root" (e.g., http://www.domain.com/) as opposed to some form of "home page" filename like home.asp, index.html, etc. Google's getting pretty good at getting those canonicalization issues figured out, but I'm sure it doesn't mind a little bit of help.
But this advice holds true throughout your site for a different reason than mere canonicalization. Suppose you have a site with a directory structure like Virgin Atlantic's. Here's a sample category URL for its flight search page:
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/index.jsp
Decent URL (even though I'm not a big fan of the /en/us/ quagmire) - at least it's not littered with dynamic arguments like it could be. But if I were working for that company, I'd recommend having that page resolve at the root of the final folder, instead of at index.jsp. Why? The earlier mentioned canonicalization issue is one reason. We don't want Google crawling both
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/index.jsp
and
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/
and thinking they're different pages. But Virgin Atlantic has already covered this. In fact, the latter URL mentioned above results in a 404. So for that site, canonicalization/duplication problems aren't an issue.
Here's the big reason I'd recommend that the URL resolve at /flighttimes/: Because in a year or two from now, when the company rolls over into a new platform, the filename and/or the file extension of that folder's home page will most likely change. When that happens, they'll be mired in 301 redirects from each directory's old home page to its new one - all the way across the site. That won't waste hundreds of staff hours, but it will consume a few.
Contrast that with a platform rollover from .jsp to .aspx, .net, or .cfm, or whatever, when the page resolves at the folder's root. In that case, we'd go from this url:
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/
to this one:
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/flighttimes/
Get it? They're the same. No lag time whatsoever. No 301s to "wait out" while they sort through their processes. No URL changes for engines makes the SEO process much smoother. Knowing how to fix SEO issues is great, but knowing how to prevent them from happening is better.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at January 12, 2007 04:19 PM
Intrapromote: [ Case studies | SEO services | Bios ]
Trackback Pings
To TrackBack this entry, use the following URL:
http://seoblog.intrapromote.com/mt-tb.cgi/346