-Paul
http://www.fortune3.com

I noticed that falcon-bikes.co.uk and http://www.falcon-bikes.co.uk resolve to 2 different sites (old and new I assume). You will want to fix that in case someone leaves the www. prefix off.

Per your 301 redirect, since index.php and just your domain are the same thing, Google will see your index.php as your homepage.

If you want, you can 301 redirect index.php to just “^$” to remove it from the URL, but Google will not mind either way.

You can see what Google has indexed for your site by searching for “site: falcon-bikes.co.uk”

The guys who set up the redirects have placed one from the old home page –
.co.uk to the new home page – .co.uk.index.php – which means that the new
one is not receiving the 9500 inbounds which were pointing at the old home
page, does that make sense?

If there is a 301 from the home page to the .co.uk/index.php – those
inbounds are just wasted then, am I right?

This being the case, can a 301 be placed on the index.php to the main home
page, will Google allow this?

Thanks

Darren
PS – if you want to have a look at what I mean, the url is falcon-bikes.co.uk

The index.php file is your home page, so it will be indexed. You do not need to 301 redirect an index.php page to just the domain name, as these are essentially the same thing.

If you old homepage was index.html, just make sure this is redirected to the new index.php page. That should be all you need.

I arrived here due to the inevitable reason I searched for 301 info on Google. My scenrio is as follows:

A good friend and business colleague has just had his site rebuilt, originally in html and now in .php – the designer has uploaded the site and created a load of 301’s so that he could get any inbounds pointing at the new pages.

Problem is, he has set the 301’s to the .co.uk/index.php and not the index page, which means that now when you type in the http://www.business.co.uk it forwards to business.co.uk/index.php.

My question is this, would it be worth while to set another 301 from the /index.php to go to the home page? I guess that we can not alter the existing redirects, so would have to set another one in place so we could get the home page indexed?

Would appreciate your thoughts.

Many thanks
Darren

When a product is discontinued and it is replaced with another product, I would think you would redirect it to the new product.

In the case of a product being discontinued and there is no replacement, I would redirect these product pages to a generic discontinued page that explains the product is no longer carried and have a category listing and search box for shoppers to find something similar.

If the keyword for that product is a popular search term for your site, you can keep the product page intact and explain you no longer offer it, but have cross-sell items on the page that people may want to purchase that are related to the discontinued item. That way you do not lose the chance to close a sale that hits your site.

Also, reminded me not to just deleted discontinued items for our ecommmerce site hosted with you guys.

So whats the common practice when a product is discontinued? Where should you redirect that page to? The product that replaces it, if there is one? How about in the case there isn’t a replacement product?

Thanks
Tim