One of the main initiatives that I recall of the Drupal.org redesign was a major SEO overhaul. I just happened to notice that we are linking to the "home" node instead of redirecting people to the top level domain on the nav masthead menu for "Drupal Homepage".

This is pushing a large amount of "link juice" to a page that is an exact duplicate of our homepage. This is a double whammy SEO bad practice, as we are leaking Page Rank, and to a page full of duplicate content.

Please fix this link to just point to http://drupal.org or to keep the "link juice" flowing properly, or 301 redirect /home to drupal.org. This will allow our homepage domain trust and link juice to propagate to more important pages that are linked to from the homepage and throughout the site than a duplicate of the actual homepage.

Thanks

Comments

lisarex’s picture

lisarex CreditAttribution: lisarex commented

Adding a 301 redirect is no problem. Happy to do it if there's another +1 from someone else.

sk33lz’s picture

sk33lz CreditAttribution: sk33lz commented

Lisa,

I just got a reminder about this issue and decided to take a look again. The link seems to have been fixed at this point, but the /home URL still exists without a 301 redirect. This is slightly better, but that page now sits like a lost puppy with a PR 8, while the Drupal.org homepage actually has a PR 9. They are being treated as 2 totally separate pages. That is not good, as we are duplicating our homepage. A 301 redirect would fix this. I will see if I can get someone else to support my idea here.

Jason

mikran’s picture

mikran CreditAttribution: mikran commented

This is related, #1525090: Drupal Homepage tab should link to '/home'

kingandy’s picture

kingandy CreditAttribution: kingandy commented

The /home URL is important as it's possible for users to change the behaviour of <front>, but may still want to be able to get to that front page content.

For what its worth, Google officially do not penalise duplicate content within the same domain, and haven't since at least 2008. They're well aware that some pages are accessible from multiple URLs (since the dawn of the Internet when '/' was synonymous with '/index.html') and aren't about to start punishing people for it. If they come across two similar pages, they mark one as the primary (or "canonical") page and attribute all further links for the secondary page(s) to the primary one.

It may be worth setting a "<link rel="canonical" href="http://drupal.org/" />" tag on the /home url to help Google decide which is the primary one, but beyond that this is an SEO non-issue.

kingandy’s picture

kingandy CreditAttribution: kingandy commented

Regarding the behaviour of the "Drupal Homepage" link in the main nav - possibly it would be worth replacing these two competing "should be /home" and "should be /" issues with a comparative "Policy" discussion? Or marking one of these as duplicate and picking up on the other.

drumm’s picture

drumm
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Location NY, US
CreditAttribution: drumm commented
Project: Drupal.org site moderators » Drupal.org cross-site customizations
Version: » 6.x-3.x-dev
Component: Redesign » Code
drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
CreditAttribution: drumm commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

Yes, /home is important because users can make "Your Dashboard" their homepage. When they do that, / redirects to their dashboard. The Drupal Homepage link should always go to the homepage, which is always available at /home.