Q and A: Why won't Google index my two home pages?
Dear Kalena...
Have you ever heard of Google refusing to index pages that have similar names? I have one page called index.htm and one page called index.html.
They are entirely different content, yet only one gets indexed.
Any help would be appreciated.
Chris
Kalena's Answer:
Dear Chris
Before I answer your question, I've got a question for you - why on earth would you want to have two index pages? I can't see any advantage to that whatsoever. You only have one home page and that's the one that should be named index.htm (OR index.html). If you have different content that you want indexed on both pages, then best to name one of them something other than the home page standard.
From my understanding, most search engine robots will naturally look for the standard home page file names when indexing your site. I believe they start with index.htm then if they don't find it, they try index.html, default.htm, default.html etc. When they find one with content, my guess is that the others are ignored or treated as the same page.
For what it's worth, Google has determined that your top level domain holds your home page content and has not indexed either of your index pages. How do I know this? Because Google has indexed 123 pages from your site, but neither index.htm or index.html is included and the cache of your home page shows your domain only.
Perhaps the existence of two index pages confused Googlebot and both were ignored as a result. Perhaps there is another reason - I don't know. To find out for sure, create and submit an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps and watch the crawl stats closely.
The lesson here is: why risk confusing search bots and visitors? Stick with one index page and name the other page something else entirely e.g. welcome.html.
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Have you ever heard of Google refusing to index pages that have similar names? I have one page called index.htm and one page called index.html.
They are entirely different content, yet only one gets indexed.
Any help would be appreciated.
Chris
Kalena's Answer:
Dear Chris
Before I answer your question, I've got a question for you - why on earth would you want to have two index pages? I can't see any advantage to that whatsoever. You only have one home page and that's the one that should be named index.htm (OR index.html). If you have different content that you want indexed on both pages, then best to name one of them something other than the home page standard.
From my understanding, most search engine robots will naturally look for the standard home page file names when indexing your site. I believe they start with index.htm then if they don't find it, they try index.html, default.htm, default.html etc. When they find one with content, my guess is that the others are ignored or treated as the same page.
For what it's worth, Google has determined that your top level domain holds your home page content and has not indexed either of your index pages. How do I know this? Because Google has indexed 123 pages from your site, but neither index.htm or index.html is included and the cache of your home page shows your domain only.
Perhaps the existence of two index pages confused Googlebot and both were ignored as a result. Perhaps there is another reason - I don't know. To find out for sure, create and submit an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps and watch the crawl stats closely.
The lesson here is: why risk confusing search bots and visitors? Stick with one index page and name the other page something else entirely e.g. welcome.html.
---------------------------
[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]
Labels: search engine optimization (seo)
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