Comments on: Why link to index.php?

By: MaThIbUs

MaThIbUs — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 09:41:55 +0000

David House: I'm not claiming we should all make our sites class C, 'cause that would just be overkill. I was promoting the silent redirection to the non-www. URI.

By: David House

David House — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:08:31 +0000

About the www thing:

People are going to type both with and without the www. to get to your site, because without the www. is quicker except for users that know the Ctrl+Enter shortcut. Hence, following the path of least surprise, both should be available and lead to your site. I’d redirect people toward the version without the www. myself, just for redundancy reasons. But the point is we can’t usably support only one version of our site, so Google will inevitably index both.

By: djn

djn — Sat, 23 Oct 2004 17:58:22 +0000

Most of the time it’s not people linking to index.whatever, it’s their authoring software that “knows better”. Also, it’s hard to expect much attention for link consistency somewhere in the future from people who don’t care if their pages are broken in another browser (or platform, or resolution) now.

By: MaThIbUs

MaThIbUs — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 13:52:09 +0000

I've written a post about www.-less URIs a couple of months ago, too. And you're right --- index.php indeed is cruft. Even in post permalinks on blogs who don't use the fancy .htaccess option (why use /index.php?p=xxx when /?p=xxx works just as well?). People who use your .htaccess code (or mine) can use relative linking without being afraid of Google double-caching their site.

By: Paul Connolley

Paul Connolley — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:31:04 +0000

On my website /about and /about/ both resolve to about.htm. If you believe that is causing problems on my web-server you need to check the manual.

Also the difference between /images and /images/ is minimal. I know that I have never had issue with it. May I also point out that I do not present directory structures to visitors so there is no reason to worry either.

By: Jeremy Flint

Jeremy Flint — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:36:18 +0000

ah, gotcha.

By: Julian

Julian — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:27:08 +0000

It was just to show you that Google has indexed both. Normal web users won’t do that search, yes.

By: Jeremy Flint

Jeremy Flint — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:22:55 +0000

Is that search really relevant? How many people (normal web users) know to search using those commands? Even if you search for just “mezzoblue”, the top result google comes back with uses http://www.mezzoblue.com as the url.

By: Julian

Julian — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:17:37 +0000

@Nathan: I have to admit that I don't know if e.g. Google handles the two things as completely different. Check this Google search. What would you say? The result with www has (according to this nice Firefox extension) a PR of 7, the non-www result a PR of 6.

By: Jeremy Flint

Jeremy Flint — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:12:54 +0000

Maybe I am thinking more of the mod-rewrite, using /about instead of about.php…

That is very possible. It has been a long week already.