Odd index.php behaviour

[sng82]

This one's a bit random.

For the sake of illustrating the point, I've built a bog-standard Laravel site with a page in it: https://mysite.com/my-page. The page works and can be loaded in any browser as you would expect.

Google have somehow indexed a version of the page with '/index.php/' in its URL: https://mysite.com/index.php/my-page.

The same behaviour seems to be present in all Laravel sites. These pages (which I assume are built in Laravel???) can all be visited without any redirects being triggered:

https://laravel.com/index.php
https://laravel.com/index.php/docs/12.x
https://laracasts.com/index.php/series
https://laravel-news.com/index.php/authentication-with-laravel-and-mongodb

laravel-news.com has the same (properly formatted) canonical tag in the head regardless of /index.php/ being present in the URL. I couldn't find any canonical tags on the Laracasts site. Those in laravel.com pages DO include the errant /index.php/. when it's present in the URL. e.g.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://laravel.com/index.php/docs/12.x/installation">

I've set up a redirect based on an old Stack Overflow answer here, so don't believe this will be a problem for my site in the future, but I was surprised this manual intervention was necessary. I would have assumed that a redirect for page requests that include index.php would be a default Laravel feature.

What am I missing? Is it a deliberate choice to let the index.php versions of pages coexist with the regular pages? If so, what's the use case? I'm no SEO expert, but is this not a potential SEO problem for all sites built with Laravel?

[mbabker]

I'm no SEO expert, but is this not a potential SEO problem for all sites built with Laravel?

This is an issue with PHP in general, not unique to Laravel:

• Symfony's website does redirect index.php, see https://symfony.com/index.php/releases/7.3 as an example
• WordPress' website 404s with index.php in the path, see https://wordpress.org/index.php/about/ as an example

The redirect solution noted in that SO answer (or even better, handled in the web server configuration instead of in PHP) is enough to take care of the issue. Arbitrarily redirecting with index.php in the path could have unintended results, so it's better for the framework to not be overly opinionated here.

[sng82]

This is an issue with PHP in general, not unique to Laravel:

Symfony's website does redirect index.php, see https://symfony.com/index.php/releases/7.3 as an example
WordPress' website 404s with index.php in the path, see https://wordpress.org/index.php/about/ as an example

100% agreed that this is a PHP problem, but 404's and redirects are both better than duplicate pages for SEO. Besides, Laravel fixes lots of PHP's problems. I'm just trying to understand why not this one.

The redirect solution noted in that SO answer (or even better, handled in the web server configuration instead of in PHP) is enough to take care of the issue.

Yet none of the sites listed - arguably three of the biggest Laravel-based sites - have a redirect for this in place. I appreciate this is probably because it hasn't been a problem for them so far, but fixing a problem before it occurs is aways better than fixing it afterwards.

Arbitrarily redirecting with index.php in the path could have unintended results

What sort of unintended results? I'm not inferring that you're wrong, I'm genuinely trying to work out what I'm missing!

[macropay-solutions]

Interesting what generates this. Is this index.php added to the sitemaps?

[sng82]

Long story short, it's a new site that has gone on an old domain.

The previous site was archaic and a bit of a mess to be honest. Most pages (there are thousands of them) could be accessed via multiple URL's and all sorts of crazy variations have been indexed by search engines over the years. Capturing and redirecting them all has been quite the task!

[macropay-solutions]

That makes it clear then.