Is a 301 redirect on the root domain bad for SEO?

Question

I have a unusual set up with a website. Unfortunately I cannot serve the website source from the root domain i.e.

http://www.example.com

I've been forced to redirect to a subdirectory to display the website content when the root URL is requested e.g.

http://www.example.com

Has a 301 redirect to:

http://www.example.com/subdirectory/index.html

Would it have an adverse affect on SEO to have this at the root domain?

Update:

After reading the below posts and studying the recommended links I used a 302 redirect. I chose this option since it appears that the Google recommendation is to use a 302 if it is a redirect from the root domain. To counter measure any possible duplication issues I made use of the rel="canonical" tag on the destination of the redirect.

Answer 1

Historically, I've maintained many MediaWiki implementations where this is the case (i.e. ^/wiki/) and, after switching to a ^/ rewrite configuration, I have not noticed any ranking differences which I would attribute to the change in URI scheme - if it's applied uniformly I wouldn't worry about it.

Answer 2

One extra thing to add, you do/will lose a very small percentage of your page rank initially from the 301 redirect. Google alludes to it in their SEO document but it isn't some huge amount, the largest percentage I have seen guessed is 15% and that is probably higher than what it is in reality.

The only reason for the small loss in SEO ranking is that Google doesn't want to reward looping redirects or looping links that build page rank.

Also, the company I work for had to do a redirect from www.example.com to www.example-product.com for the entire site and we saw a drop in SERPs for 1 day and then jumped back to the levels from before to the switch.

Overall, the biggest thing Google says is that you should do what you need to do to give your users the best experience and Google's web crawlers have been given enough logic to reward you for that. They have over 200 rules for a reason, to make sure they don't ding you much or at all for making your site better. As others have said major wiki sites do this all the time and haven't seen a huge hit to PR. Even if you take a very minor hit initially it is for the benefit of the site in the long run so it will be a positive change.

Answer 3

Definitely not. This is a widely used redirection tool across many sites. My personal site redirects from the root directory to a wordpress folder and maintains a pagerank of six.

Answer 4

Three Downsides:

• Your root domain URL is your most linked page, a HTTP 301 redirect only passes about 90% of the value, you lose 10% of your link value of these links.
• Navigational queries (i.e.: the "domain part" of "domain.tld") are less likely to produce site links.
• Less deep-crawling: Google crawls top down - starts with the most linked site, which will most likely be your domain URL, as this does not exist you waste this zero level of crawling depth. (just say: I have had crawling issues on one site where such a setup existed, it got better after I made the start page == root domain).

Another Point:

What about the robots.txt? the robots.txt is only allowed on the root of the domain. If it's not possible for you to deploy it on the root you will not be able to use that very useful tool.

If your site has a commercial intend (a.k.a. you want to earn money with it) you should go the extra mile (i.e. switch server provider, switch framework) to make this very basic step right.

Additionally a Google'er once said that for this kind of start page redirect should better be an HTTP 302, But I didn't dig deeper on this....