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View Full Version : Help! 73% going to index.htm???

jxm28788
17-Oct-2003, 09:51 AM
I've just taken a look at my log with a log analyzer and it says that for entry pages, 73% of users were on index.htm (which doesn't exist), and only 9% were using index.html which is my homepage...

Most of the links to my site are set to -

"http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk"

and if you type that into a browser it works fine, as does the more specific -

"http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/index.html"

but this gives an error -

"http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk/index.htm"

So what's going on??? Why is that the entry page and does that mean 73% of users are getting an error?
taliesyn
17-Oct-2003, 12:30 PM
It's probably just web spiders trying to access the page directly.

If you're worried about it, why not create an index.htm page containing something like the following:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>LowCarbGoodies Redirect Page</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
</head>
<body>
<div align="center">
<p>You have reached an incorrect page.</p>
<p>If your browser does not forward you, please click
<a href="http://www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk">here</a> to
be redirected to the LowCarbGoodies main index.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Obviously it needs "tarting up" somewhat but it will work :)

The refresh will generally forward them automatically to your main page, but if it doesn't then they can just click the link.
rmladden
17-Oct-2003, 03:01 PM
Search engines probably have your old index.htm page indexed. You do not want to lose that. I would change my home page to index.htm and create an index.html redirect page.
jxm28788
17-Oct-2003, 03:08 PM
I don't think I ever had an index.htm file - at least not that I know of. Also my site is not in any search engines yet, only google ads at the moment and they're all set to "www.lowcarbgoodies.co.uk"

What is the default that the browser looks for if no file is specified? I thought it was index.html...?
rmladden
17-Oct-2003, 03:13 PM
It is set in the server, not the browser. On the server you can set the order of files to search if the file is not in th eURL, such as:
index.htm
index.html
index.cfm
index.asp
index.cgi

You get the idea.
Darren B
17-Oct-2003, 03:17 PM
it is

if you have index.htm & index.html it will always pick up the .html page first.

Cheers
Darren
Darren B
17-Oct-2003, 03:18 PM
guess someone was replying at the same time, anyway on my server it is .html first. See your always learning
jxm28788
17-Oct-2003, 04:16 PM
how would one go about setting that on the server...?
rmladden
17-Oct-2003, 04:35 PM
That depends on the server. On IIS it is one of the many properties of the folder. On Apache it is buried in one of the config files.
taliesyn
17-Oct-2003, 07:57 PM
Originally posted by jxm28788
how would one go about setting that on the server...?

Yours is Apache by the way:

Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) FrontPage/5.0.2.2623 AuthMySQL/2.20

You would need to modify the .htaccess file as follows

DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm

Filenames are in order of precedence.

You also need to make sure that the .htaccess file is in your site's root. This will ensure that index.html, if present, will be loaded before index.htm.

Have fun! :D
jcwtrading
04-Nov-2003, 07:51 AM
Out of interest, what log analyzer software are you using?
jxm28788
04-Nov-2003, 07:53 AM
Absolute log analyser (demo). I just searched the web and found this. Not sure I'd recomend it, but it shows some useful stats til I find a proper analyser...