Hi, A client of mine has a redirect on their homepage. What is the impact of this on SEO ranking? I would think it causes a problem as the main url www.xxx.com does not have content and is redirected to a sub folder of that domain which has the content. They are using a 301 redirect. Please advise how this would affect SEO and what are the best options to solve it
Did their website have any Page Rank to begin with? How many backlinks do they have? Did you setup a redirect in Google Webmaster Tools?
They currently have a very low pagerank ie 1. They currently have a few hundred backlinks but they are not ranking at all on any big keywords relating to their industry
In my opinion, soon google will only pick the sub folder for that site. So, the homepage will be disapear. I had tried this case.
i agree with komrad.., Google will considers sub folder for that site. and as it is a permananent 301 redirection so ranking does not effects.., Goolge might drop its positions for 3-4 weeks and later it reverts original rankings
There will not be any concern of Home page as it is already redirected to subfolder. I think it will be okay after a little fluctuation. You need to build link for sub-pages considering it your new home page.
All are depend upon the relevant and strong baclinks for the website are you using the 301 redirection. I also used it for two times when my website bears a PR of 3 when I used 301 redirection it affect the PR for two weeks but after two weeks my website again get the PR as earlier.
Yes, as many have answered already, the homepage of website will disappear from the results and the sub folder will appear. As you have given 301 redirect, any page rank that you homepage may have had, will be passed on to the subfolder.
some link juice and PR is lost with the 301 redirects, how much of it? no one knows exactly. If your client is planning to use the homepage at some point in the future I would advice either putting the content from the subfolder on the homepage or using a 302 redirect.
What they have done is harm their SEO efforts. All PR Link Juice will be lost because the URL for the "default" home page will be different. It also will screw up internal navigation. And screw up the use of < link rel='canonical' href='http://www.catanich.com/'> that has become so important to google. It would have been smater to copy and paste the HTML from the subdirectory to the default web page. Also Google hates redirects anyway.
why are you not edit your home page? make it attract with fresh content, I hope you would get your desire result.
Your rankings and traffic may dwindle for a short period after redirection. Since you redirecting page has no content, so it hardly matters. It don’t think this will impact your SEO in any ways.