Google and Web Page Names -- Part 4

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 13. January 2008 - 0:00

You have a website, I have a website, everybody has a website, even my dog has his own website. Each website is made of web pages. Each web page has at least one address, the URL: the Uniformed Resource Locator such as http://www.foto-biz.com.

In today's world, very few people write website by hand, crafting the web pages with raw HTML. Almost all websites are generated by some software. From Wordpress for blogs, to Mediawiki for wikis like Wikipedia to specialize scripts and software like Adobe's Dreamweaver.

Techno-Babble warning:

  • No website uses the website name.
  • All websites use a redirect from one of the following URL: index.html index.htm default.htm index.php index.php3 index.phtml index.php5 index.shtml mwindex.phtml in that order to an actual web page or a script.

So foto-biz.com, foto-biz.com/, www.foto-biz.com, foto-biz.com/doku.php, foto-biz.com/doku.php/start, foto-biz.com/start/, foto-biz.com/pmwiki.php and all the variations with and without www. all point to the same web page. But Google doesn't know that. Google takes each of these names as a different web page, therefore the [Page Rank][1] and all the links will be divided between all of these pages.

There are a couple of ways of dealing with the URL

  1. The web application can rename the web pages so that the name stays consistent.
  2. Use .htaccess to redirect the various names to the same web page.

Here's a portion of my .htaccess file as an example:

 RewriteRule  ^doku.php$           http://www.foto-biz.com/  [R=301,L,NC]
 RewriteRule  ^doku.php/$          http://www.foto-biz.com/  [R=301,L,NC]
 RewriteRule  ^doku.php/doku.php$  http://www.foto-biz.com/  [R=301,L,NC]
 RewriteRule  ^doku.php/start$     http://www.foto-biz.com/  [R=301,L,NC]

You will need to discuss that with your “techie”. If he can't, then it's time to look for a “real techie”.