Background

A discussion on r/laravel identified that applications running on serversideup/php images (including those on Laravel Cloud) serve identical content at both /path and /index.php/path. The original poster discovered this because Bing had begun indexing /index.php/... URLs alongside the canonical clean URLs.

They were specifically referencing this line as an issue:

Further investigation

After running some tests, we found this issue is across all our web server variations:

Problem

All three web server variations (fpm-nginx, fpm-apache, frankenphp) allow direct browser and crawler requests to /index.php/some/path to reach PHP, where the framework strips the /index.php prefix and routes the request normally. This means every route in an application has two publicly accessible URLs that return identical content:

• Canonical: https://laravel-news.com/speeding-up-laravel-news-with-cloudflare
• Duplicate: https://laravel-news.com/index.php/speeding-up-laravel-news-with-cloudflare

This causes three concrete SEO problems:

1. Duplicate content indexing — search engines index both URLs as separate pages with the same content
2. Link equity dilution — inbound links and ranking signals are split across two URLs instead of consolidated on one
3. Crawl budget waste — crawlers spend time re-fetching content they've already indexed under a different URL

Proposed solution

Add a 301 Moved Permanently redirect that intercepts direct requests to /index.php/... and redirects to the clean URL, preserving query strings. This is applied across all three web server variations.

# Redirect /index.php/... to /... to prevent SEO duplicate content
location ~ ^/index\.php(/.+)$ {
    return 301 $1$is_args$args;
}

# Redirect /index.php/... to /... to prevent SEO duplicate content
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/index\.php/
RewriteRule ^/index\.php(/.+)$ $1 [R=301,L,QSA]

# Redirect /index.php/... to /... to prevent SEO duplicate content
@indexphp path_regexp indexphp ^/index\.php(/.+)$
redir @indexphp {re.indexphp.1} 301

Why 301 redirect (not 404)

• 301 tells search engines the canonical URL is the clean version. Any existing ranking signals on /index.php/... URLs are transferred to the clean URL. Bookmarks and external links continue to work.
• 404 would discard any existing ranking signals and break any bookmarks or external links pointing to /index.php/... URLs.

How this affects sites that care about SEO

• Search engines that have already indexed /index.php/... URLs will follow the 301 and update their index to the clean URL
• Link equity currently split across duplicate URLs will consolidate on the canonical URL
• Crawl budget is no longer wasted on duplicate paths
• No rel=canonical tag or robots.txt rules are needed — the server handles it at the HTTP level, which is the most authoritative signal

How to test

You can test this image using our serversideup/php-dev repository, which automatically builds on push to this PR.

serversideup/php-dev:646-*

View the available testing images →

Further comment

If you support this change, please vote with a 👍 on this PR. If you disagree or have an alternative approach, please vote with a 👎 and comment below with your proposed solution and reasoning.