Displaying “index.php” in URL

Question

Is there a best practice/convention to have www.example.com as opposed to www.example.com/index.php in a site's URL? I made the links to the homepage relative (i.e. href="index.php") as opposed to absolute, which causes "index.php" to appear in the URL.

Does this impact SEO, or is it considered sloppy? Should I write an apache rewrite rule to change requests to www.example.com/index.php to www.example.com?

Answer 1

You generally want to avoid having the same page available via. multiple URLs (in your case presumably example.com/ and example.com/index.php), although this isn't an issue if you add a rel canonical tag. The simplest fix for you, if you want to keep using relative links would be to just use a href="./" when you want to link to the index.php page.

Answer 2

The place when it looks sloppy is when people quote your URL and put the index.php on the end. Tim's suggestion should help you with any SEO issues, so it's a good thing to do.