Home Page SEO Tips

I really messed up my home page of my Oasis Fanatic web site. What I did in the beginning was I redirected the default home page “/index.php” to “/home/index.php”. I initially put the home page in its own directory “/home/”.

Over time, I began to realise the dumbness of this idea. Therefore, I made the home page at “/index.php” the default while I kept the other home page at “/home/index.php” intact.

Another problem is people usually link back to my site directly to the domain name http://www.oasisfanatic.com. In the search engine’s eyes, I have 3 home pages:

1. http://www.oasisfanatic.com – Google PR 3
2. http://www.oasisfanatic.com/index.php – Google PR 2
3. http://www.oasisfanatic/home/index.php

The reason why home page 2 exists is because I link back to my home page on my web site’s navigation to that address when I should have linked it directy to home page 1. There are no links to home page 3 on my web site but there are some old back links to this page.

How Did I Fix My Multiple Home Page Problem?

1. I updated the links back to my home page to my domain name http://www.oasisfanatic.com in all my web site’s navigation.
2. I created a 301 redirect for the old home page at “/home/index.php” so that it redirects all visitors to http://www.oasisfanatic.com instead.

What I learnt from this experience is to simply link back to the domain name of the web site for the home page. This would improve the SEO of your home page as well as your web site as the search engines won’t think you have duplicate content on your “multiple home pages”. They regard “http://www.domain.com” and “http://www.domain.com/index.html” as 2 seperate pages.