Does the url in for your homepage impact SEO
-
Is there any harm to SEO having a homepage url that is not clean like www.domain.com. For example citi uses https://online.citi.com/US/login.do Does that matter in any way? Would a company like citi benefit from changing to www.citi.com as their homepage?
-
So long as www.citi.com points to https://online.citi.com/US/login.do, via the platform code and/or the .htaccess file, then it doesn't matter.
The primary issue is a domain name that is easy for users to type in and remember if they know the site and want to access it directly, rather than from a search engine results page. The cleaner the better. Once the user is on the site, then it is fine for the domain to point to a site in a subfolder.
For example, some WordPress users prefer to have their blog in a subfolder to keep their main directory tidy, and this is even when the blog is the purpose of the site in the first place, and not a subset of the site. It is quite common to see www.mysite.com/blog, where www.mysite.com redirects to the blog folder and that is then the index page for the website.
IOW, a user might type in "mysite.com" and then will be auto redirected to mysite.com/blog via the PHP code and the .htaccess file.
One drawback is that the location of the main site in a folder may add a small amount of latency to load times. A slight redirect as you show in your example is quite common, so search engines are used to it.
No, I don't see there being a penalty from a search engine company.
As to which is "better", you have to think through your business goals for the site and determine the best information architecture and site design for your services, products, company, or organization. That will drive the correct answer to that question.
-- Jewel
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
-
Same URL-Structure & the same number of URLs indexed on two different websites - can it lead to a Google penalty?
Hey guys. I've got a question about the url structure on two different websites with a similar topic (bith are job search websites). Although we are going to publish different content (texts) on these two websites and they will differ visually, the url structure (except for the domain name) remains exactly the same, as does the number of indexed landingpages on both pages. For example, www.yyy.com/jobs/mobile-developer & www.zzz.com/jobs/mobile-developer. In your opinion, can this lead to a Google penalty? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vde130 -
Best SEO url woocommerce, what to do?
Hi! Today we have our product categories indexed (by misstake) and for one of our desired keywords, a category have the nr 1 rank. By misstake, we didnt set nofollow, noindex on our categories, just tags, archives etc. We are now migrating to from Ithemes Exchange to Woocommerce and ime looking on improving our SEO urls for the categories. For keyword "Key1" we rank with this url: http://site/product-category/Key1. The seo meta title and description where untouched when we launched the site last spring so it doesnt look so good.. The plan is to stripe out product-category and instead ad some description ( i have a newly written text of 95 words, 519 letters without space with they keyword precent 5 times in a natural way ) to that particular category and have the url as following: http://site/key1 and then have a 301 redirect for the old http://site/product-category/Key1. What do you think of this? What shall i consider? on the right track? Grateful for any help! // Jonas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
SSL for SEO?
To obtain an SEO benefit from an SSL is there any particular type or brand which is recommended or has a track history? It seems you can pay anything between $20 and $???? (For that matter whatever you want to pay!). Any experience gratefully accepted! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Technical SEO
Hi Team, What are the points we are missing on our website from technical SEO front? http://www.giftxoxo.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
SEO Site Analysis
I am looking for a company doing a SEO analysis on our website www.interelectronix.com and write a optimization proposal incl. a budgetary quote for performing those optimizations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | interelectronix0 -
What is the value of Google Crawling Dynamic URLS with NO SEO
Hi All I am Working on travel site for client where there are 1000's of product listing pages that are dynamically created. These pages are not SEO optimised and are just lists of products with no content other than the product details. There are no meta tags for title and description on the listings pages. You then click Find Out more to go to the full product details. There is no way to SEO these Dynamic pages This main product details has no content other than details and now meta tags. To help increase my google rankings for the rest of the site which is search optimised would it be better to block google from indexing these pages. Are these pages hurting my ability to improve rankings if my SEO of the content pages has been done to a good level with good unique Titles, descriptions and useful content thanks In advance John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ingageseo0 -
SEO for eCommerce?
I'm working on a game plan for the on-page optimization for a growing e-commerce site (https://www.boutine.com) and I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar projects. Specifically, how to get the most SEO value out of product and category pages. Thanks in advance! -Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boutine0 -
Is there any negative SEO effect of having comma's in URL's?
Hello, I have a client who has a large ecommerce website. Some category names have been created with comma's in - which has meant that their software has automatically generated URL's with comma's in for every page that comes beneath the category in the site hierarchy. eg. 1 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/ eg. 2 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/action-and-adventure/ etc... I know that URL's with comma's in look a bit ugly! But is there 'any' SEO reason why URL's with comma's in are any less effective? Kind Regs, RB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO0