pointing to .../index.php

My URL www.emuenzen.de/forum/index.php has a PR of 7 .

I didn´t manage to configure vBSEO so that it points always to that homepage. Can you give me a short advise ?

this is some thing i would like too...it may be better to have it end with /
but all my page ranck is with the index.php

plus i have another hack that has an index.php file and it take that out too

with a 301 redirect, the PR7 should be on the / soon, i would make this step, its just once.

I don´t want to use a redirect !

Hi all:

I apologize for the delay in responding to this issue. We've been extremely busy getting RC5 ready for release.

There is another important factor to consider - vB actually has a feature to define the homepage script name in Admin CP (i.e. "Script Name for Forum Home Page"). For instance, if you define forums.php to be the homepage script, then vBSEO will use this as your homepage link instead of root. At present, the only homepage script that will always be replaced with root is index.php. We could add a feature to disable index.php from being pointed to root. However, I will explain why we are hesistant to do this:

In general, we do not view using index.php as good SEO. Firstly, if you use index.php, then a root reference will also be valid and will create an opportunity for duplicate content. Secondly, the primary goal of vBSEO is to get rid of dynamic (.php) URLs to improve SEO for your forums. Therefore, when we started replacing all index.php links with root, we immediately realized that we needed to add the "homepage alias" feature in order to consolidate PR from the various ways your forum root can be accessed:

http://yourdomain.com/forum/
http://yourdomain.com/forum/index.php
http://yourdomain.com/forum/index.php?

We discovered that each of the above links often has a different PageRank and is therefore being indexed separately by Google. It would obviously be much more preferable to consolidate the entire PR from each link to just one (i.e. root). The "homepage alias" feature makes sure that all other ways of accessing your forum root are always 301 redirected to root. Therefore, the PR from these other root accessing URLs is passed (via 301) in Google to root and consolidated there.

Once this is in place, all future links that people place to your forum will be directed to your root and PageRank acquired from external links will not be spread unnecessarily to 2 or more locations.

I understand that it can be intimidating to change anything about a URL that already has an established Pagerank, so I will look into this feature depending on what the consensus is from our testing team regarding this issue.

/* FYI We are looking into adding a vBSEO extensions module that will allow users with PHP experience to make changes to vBSEO's process. Rewriting root links to point to index.php would be one example of what can be accomplished with the extensions module. */

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Juan

/* NOTE: This feature has been adopted and will be included in vBSEO RC5.*/