Steve Fortuna

One issue many web masters run into is the problem of having multiple URLs where you can access the homepage of your site.

For example, there are some sites you can access by going to: http://domain.com, http://www.domain.com, and http://www.domain.com/index.php

In a previous post I talked about either forcing www or no www for your domain. In this post I will show you how to check to see if /index.php is requested, and how to remove it.

The solution is a rather simple .htaccess rule:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.php$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Let me break down the lines for you. The first line simply turns on the RewriteEngine. Don’t include this line if RewriteEngine On is already present in your .htaccess file.

The second line checks the HTTP REQUEST for index.php. And the third line redirects the user to the domain, without the /index.php.

This is important as well. You will want to check your website to see if you link to the domain.com/index.php version of your website anywhere. If you do, you will want to change it to link to the domain.com/ version instead.

I’ve recently seen a few websites where the homepage.com is PR6, but the homepage.com/index.php is PR4. This causes Google to treat the pages as two separate pages, and can hurt you in rankings. Don’t let this happen to you!

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