Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is having my homepage on a subfolder harmful?
-
Hi guys,
I am the webmaster of the following two websites:
www.gpblog.com/nl
www.gpblog.com/enThe first URL is the Dutch version of GPBlog, the second URL is the UK version of GPblog. Whenever a person visits www.gpblog.com he gets redirected to either the Dutch version or the UK version based on his location.
My question is: is it harmful to have 1. your homepage on a subfolder and 2. is it harmful to run two different languages on one domain using this technique?
Thank you in advance!
-
I tend to use the base domain as the site's 'home' language (e.g: if the blog was first conceived in the UK and the authors live in the UK, then I'd use "/" as en-GB). I only create sub-folders for the 'additional' languages (e.g: "/nl", "/de", "/fr" etc)
Even 301 redirects can dilute SEO authority a little (or a lot, under the wrong circumstances). Since lots of webmasters and editors will just 'lazy-link' to the base domain (or because it makes the link look cleaner / more legit within their content) I'd have your primary language deployment at the base domain, then all the rest in sub-folders
This is my go-to approach and to be honest it's never failed me yet
-
Hi
It may not impact - but am not a fan of that structure, it could get complicated easy for google and for scaling.
Would recommend:-
Check out https://www.disneylandparis.com/nl-nl/ etc. hopelessly slow...
Regards
-
Personally, I don't see why the folder structure would negatively affect your SEO. I recommend that you use the tag to cleanly denote what is in English & whats in Dutch.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage was removed from google and got deranked
Hello experts I have a problem. The main page of my homepage got deranked severely and now I am not sure how to get the rank back. It started when I accidentally canonicalized the main page "https://kv16.dk" to a page that did not exist. 4 months later the page got deranked, and you were not able to see the "main page" in the search results at all, not even when searching for "kv16.dk". Then we discovered the canonicalization mistake and fixed it, and were able to get the main page back in the search results when searching for "kv16.dk". At first after we made the correction, some weeks passed by, and the ranking didn't get better. Google search console recommended uploading a sitemap, do we did that. However in this sitemap there was a lot of "thin content sites", for all the wordpress attachments. E.g. for every image in an article. more exactly there were 91 of these attachment sites, and the rest of the page consists of only two pages "main page" and an extra landing page. After that google begun recommending the attachment urls in some searches. We tried fixing it by redirecting all the attachments to their simple form. E.g. if it was an attachment page for an image we redirected strait to the image. Google has not yet removed these attachment pages, so the question is if you think it will help to remove the attachments via google search console, or will that not help at all? For example when we search "kv16" an attachment URL named "birksø" is one of the first results
Technical SEO | | Christian_T0 -
Subdomain or subfolder?
Hello, We are working on a new site. The idea of the site is to have an ecommerce shop, but the homepage will be a content page, basically a blog page.
Technical SEO | | pinder325
My developer wants to have the blog (home) page on a subdomain, so blog.example.com, because it will be easier to make a nice content page this way, and the the rest of the site will just be on the root domain (example.com). I'm just worried that this will be bad for our SEO efforts. I've always thought it was better to use a sub folder rather than a subdomain. If we get links to the content on the subdomain, will the link juice flow to the shop, on the root domain? What are your thoughts?0 -
Robots.txt in subfolders and hreflang issues
A client recently rolled out their UK business to the US. They decided to deploy with 2 WordPress installations: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt
Technical SEO | | lauralou82
US site - https://www.clientname.com/us/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt We've had various issues with /us/ pages being indexed in Google UK, and /uk/ pages being indexed in Google US. They have the following hreflang tags across all pages: We changed the x-default page to .com 2 weeks ago (we've tried both /uk/ and /us/ previously). Search Console says there are no hreflang tags at all. Additionally, we have a robots.txt file on each site which has a link to the corresponding sitemap files, but when viewing the robots.txt tester on Search Console, each property shows the robots.txt file for https://www.clientname.com only, even though when you actually navigate to this URL (https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt) you’ll get redirected to either https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt or https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt depending on your location. Any suggestions how we can remove UK listings from Google US and vice versa?0 -
Homepage not indexed - seems to defy explanation
Hey folks Hoping to get some more eyes on a specific problem I am seeing with a clients site. Site: http:www.ukjuicers.com We have checked everything we can think of and the usual suspects here are not present: Canonical URL is in place Site is shown as indexed in search console No Crawl, DNS, Connectivity or server errors No robots.txt blocking - verified in search console No robots meta tags or directives Fetch as Google works Fetch & render works site command returns all other pages info command does not return the homepage homepage is cached and cache has been updated since this issue started: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ukjuicers.com homepage is indexed in yahoo and Bing all variations redirect to the www.ukjuicers.com domain (.co.uk, .com, www, sans www etc) The only issue I found after some extensive digging was some issues with the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site both being available and both specifying the canonical version as themselves. So, http site used canonicals with http and https site used canonicals with https. So, a conflict there with the canonical exacerbating the problem it is there to solve. The HTTPS site is not indexed though and we have set this up in webmaster tools and now the web developer has set redirects to ensure all versions even the https now 301 redirect to the http://www.ukjuicers.com page so these canonical issues have been ironed out. But... it's still not indexing the homepage. The practical implications of this are quite scary - the site used to be somewhere between 1st and 4th for keywords like 'juicers', 'juicer' etc. Now they are bottom of page 1 or top of page 2 with an internal page. They were jostling with the big boys (amazon, argos, john lewis etc) but now they are right at the bottom of the second page. It's a strange one - i have seen all manor of technical problems over the years but this one seems to defy sensible explanation. The next step is to do a full technical SEO audit of the site but I am always of the opinion that with many eyes all bugs are shallow so if anyone has any input or experience with odd indexation problems like this would love to get your input. Cheers
Technical SEO | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus0 -
Moving from a subdomain to subfolder
Hello, I am currently working on a site that is leveraging multiple subdomains. I wanted to see if it suggested to migrate them into subfolders. One of the subdomains is a .shop and the other is location specific. Thanks, T
Technical SEO | | Tucker_100 -
301 Redirects in subfolders
Hi, we're making our site into a static site but I would like to transfer the Google juice. Most of the links and database exist on subfolders though. Could I simply do 301 redirects on the subfolders and retain the value or does it have to be on the full domain?
Technical SEO | | Therealmattyd0 -
Is it a problem to have a homepage with a slug / URL ?
Hi, We are designing a web site for one of our clients, and using a home made CMS. I don't know how this CMS has been built, but anyways, in the end the homepage has a URL format which looks like this : www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html. No www.mydomain.com. Is it dangerous for SEO to have a slug/URL directly on the homepage ? Do you have experiences, cases where it has impacted a site negatively ? The main problem I expect is duplicate content (with Google seeing both www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html as being different pages) but apparently the CMS is doing a 302 redirect from the root domain to the URL (I told my colleague it should at least be a 301). Sorry if this question seems like basic SEO knowledge, but I really can't find a definitive answer on the subject. Thank you very much 🙂
Technical SEO | | edantadis0 -
Set base-href to subfolders - problems?
A customer is using the <base>-tag in an odd way: <base href="http://domain.com/1.0.0/1/1/"> My own theory is that the subfolders are added as the root because of revision control. CSS, images and internal links are used like this:
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia
internal link I ran a test with Xenu Link Sleuth and found many broken links on the site, but I can't say if it is due to the base-tag. I have read that the base-tag may cause problems in some browsers, but is this usage of base-tag bad in some SEO-perspective? I have a lot of problems with this customer and I want to know if the base-tag is a part of it.0