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SEOComet

Home page redirects

SEOComet checks that the other versions of your home page address, with or without www and https, redirect to your home page.

Updated

Your home page can be reached at up to four addresses: with or without www, over http or https. Only one of them should show the site. The others should redirect to it, or search engines can find two copies of every page.

The home page’s uptime check tests this for you.

Which addresses are checked

SEOComet opens the other versions of your site’s address (http or https, with or without www), leaving out the one your home page ends up on. For a home page that ends up on https://www.example.com/, those are:

  • http://www.example.com
  • http://example.com
  • https://example.com

Each should redirect to the address your home page ends up on, in one step. A trailing slash or a query string doesn’t matter.

An address with no DNS record is skipped, since it can’t be reached at all. So is one that answers 401, 403 or 429: that’s a firewall or bot protection turning SEOCometBot away, which says nothing about where visitors end up. The check is also skipped for a site whose address has a port or a path, or whose home page redirects to a different site.

An address that doesn’t answer in time, can’t be connected to or answers with a server error is tried again once 2 seconds later before it counts as broken, so a single slow answer doesn’t open an incident.

You see the results under Other addresses on the home page’s uptime check. Each address shows Redirects here., Shows the site itself, no redirect., Takes 2 redirects. One is enough. (with the real number), or what went wrong.

How often

Once every hour, after an uptime check that found the home page up. In between, the last results stay, so an open incident doesn’t close and reopen.

Switch to the real address

If your home page starts redirecting to another address of the same site, for example from example.com to https://www.example.com, people who can edit the site see an offer in its Settings to switch to it. Choose Switch to watch that address instead. The checks on the old host move with it. Each keeps its history and starts fresh, with nothing compared to the old address. Sitemaps on other hosts stay where they are.

What it can find

Issues the home page redirect check raises
Other address broken Warning Once every hour, the homepage check also opens the site at http and https, with and without www. This warning means one of those addresses doesn’t load, or lands on a page other than your homepage. An address with no DNS record is skipped.
Duplicate copy of the site Warning One of those addresses shows the site itself instead of redirecting to the homepage, so search engines can find two copies of every page.
More redirects than needed Suggestion One of those addresses takes two or more redirects to reach the homepage where one would do. Shown on the check, with no incident or alert.

More redirects than needed is a suggestion. It shows on the check but doesn’t open an incident or send an alert, and the check still passes.