Possible to block index.php?????

Client Joined: Dec 04, 2004 Posts: 757

Hello all, over my time with gt nextgen I find quite often I see my index.php and index.html pages turn up in google surely this cant be that good as google will see it as duplicate pages??? anyway I was wondering is it possible to block the index.php etc in like robots.txt?????
Thanks for any advise
mrix

Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 9:20 am

Curious. I know of a couple of sites who have both listed that don't seem to be hurting for google status. It certainly poses an interesting question though.

-sting

Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 9:29 am

Yes it would be possible but if Google is listing both, then both url's must exist or must have existed at some point for them to get crawled and indexed.

You should also bear in mind that not every bot will read the robots.txt file and do as it is told.

The only way I know of to get index.php dropped from the index would be to create an error page which provided the bot with the correct header response then place a redirect in htaccess from /index.php to your new error page.
However, even that is not quite as straight forward as it seems - if mod_rewrite stopped working for whatever reason, this would render your homepage completely inaccesible.

In summary - I wouldnt worry about it. Google is not going to penalise you.