Chiropractic Homepage

by Michael Dorausch, DC

PageRank (PR) is hard enough to come by for the typical chiropractic website. You don’t need to make things more difficult for yourself by splitting your PageRank amongst two or more pages possibly being indexed as your web site homepage file.

It’s common to see web sites using homepage files such as index.php, index.html, index.htm, and even index.shtml. If your chiropractic web site is showing results in search engines like Google for both the document root and your index file, you are likely splitting your PageRank, and possibly affecting the overall ranking to your chiropractic web site.

What you will want to do is have your webmaster set up a 301 redirect so that only one instance shows. Personally, I prefer to redirect from files such as index.htm to the domain root, and not the other way around.

What this appears like
As an example take a look at the homepage for Planet Chiropractic. You can enter the following into a browser… http://planetc1.com/ but the URL address that is going to display will include the www prefix, which is technically a subdomain.

Why is this important?
It’s important for search engines to know that there is only one destination for your homepage, not two, or sometimes even three. If you’re showing more than one version of the same content on your homepage, it could be considered duplicate content, and it may affect your overall rankings in the search engines.

Once again, what you want is a 301 redirect. Talk to your chiropractic webmaster for more information.