301

I am looking at using 301’s to handle the move from our old site to CS-Cart in an attempt to help keep search engine position as well as make it easier on any customers who end up linked to old pages. This makes complete sense to me for all of my pages except one… the home page.



The old sites home page is index.htm… and cs-cart is index.php. This has made the transition easier because both sites can reside together as I prepare for the cutover, but I’m not sure what the 301 will be for the homepage.



I intend to make an entry redirecting index.htm to index.php, but does that cover it for Google? When google lists mydomain.com, is it tracking it as index.htm or is it independent of what my actual home page is called?



Does that make sense? I guess a better way of asking the question is, does Google care if my home page name changes from index.htm to index.php as long as I configure my htaccess file to display whichever one is correct?

Hi There,



It does’t really matter for the main root of your site. You shouldn’t need to set up a redirect at all as Google doesn’t care what the “file” is at the root of your site. Depending how your server is set up, index.* files have a certain rank that they resolve to. You simply need to take out the file type you don’t want and your directory will resolve to the correct one.



B



EDIT: Spelling.

Thanks bholland… I may create one anyway in case anyone directly linked to index.htm, but that helps for understanding the search engines.