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
-
What should I name my Wordpress homepage?
I work almost exclusively in wordpress now. And I always hesitate when it comes to naming a site's homepage. I have to give it a name - right? I usually pick the business name or /home. And then that is identifies as the site's static homepage in the Wordpress settings and it works just fine. But I've started to get warning that it is an issue because it creates redirects. For example, I just ran the Ryte service analysis on a website and it warned me about "Non-indexable pages with high relevance" and it's basically my homepage that has 29 incoming links that "passes all pagerank to https://ourdomain/home But what am I supposed to call my homepage if not "Home"? It's not like the old days where anyone has to type it in. The root domain loads the homepage just as it should. Can anybody advise me regarding best practices for what to name a Wordpress homepage for good SEO? With thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | Dandelion0 -
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 -
2 Versions of Same Homepage
We want to show new and returning visitors different versions of our homepage (same URL) What, if anything, should we use as the markup to tell Google what we are doing?
Technical SEO | | theLotter
Any danger that Google will think we are cloaking? Thanks!0 -
Simple 301 redirect a subfolder to another subfolder
Hi, I have a number of sub-folders that I have to move, each of which contains a number of files. subfolder A has files a, b & c subfolder B has files d, e & f
Technical SEO | | aactive
subfolder C has files g, h & i A, B & C folders need to be X, Y & Z Will the following work? RewriteRule ^subfolder-A/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-X/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-B/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-C/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Z/ [R=301,L] will this result in visitors to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-B/f.html being redirected to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/f.html? All on the same domain. in reality we are talking hundreds of sub folders and thousands of files so we don't want to have to reference every file individually in the htaccess. Thanks0 -
Empty Meta Robots Directive - Harmful?
Hi, We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as: on all of the site. I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass. So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc. And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site). Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/ I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting. And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing. Cheers,
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
H1 Tag as Logo on the Homepage.
So I was working on a Genesis theme website where they have the H1 Tag as the Logo on the homepage. I wanted this changed because I always use my H1 tag to include a keyword I want to rank for. I was told by the Genesis Forum Manager that Yoast said the Logo should be the H1 tag on the homepage. (Yoast has a WP SEO Plugin that is very popular) That makes no sense to me, so I was looking for Opinions. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Can local SEO harm national rankings?
Today I met with a firm called Localeze that provides local directory submissions. I understand the importance of this service if your site is competing locally, however I'm not sure the effects of local SEO for a national brand. Our firm gets most of our traffic from across the country, not just one location, and our business is scattered (which is a good thing). We rank for service related keywords that are not tied to a location. We do not show up for local results so our business in our immediate location is weak. We would like to increase our local presence in search engines but I want to make sure that this will not take away from our national presence. Will optimizing a site for local search negatively affect general rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | KevinBloom1