SEO for site with 301 redirect on root domain to subfolder

Question

I've been asked to do SEO for a site. The site is made using Wordpress and prestashop. Because of this the root domain has a 301 redirect to a subfolder - domain/shop/

For my SEO submission work, I know it's not good practice to submit urls that have redirects on them and a lot of the time it's not allowed.

After searching the net I think my best bet is to do all my site submissions using the url - domain/shop/ even though it will take a lot more listings to get them up in ranking compared to using their root domain. I'm not sure how it will work. The root domain has the greatest rank then passes rank to the rest of the site.

If I'm targeting the subfolder will it work?

Answer 1

I can't see any reason why what you're proposing would not work, and since Google is about to set about penalising overly sculpted sites I would worry more about having friendly URLs than passing juice.

Have you thought about using a sub-domain instead of domain.com/shop i.e. shop.domain.com. This is fairly normal practice. To give you an example the Daily Telegraph uses Wordpress as a blog platform and gets around the same issue by using http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ in place of http://www.telegraph.co.uk/blogs.

Answer 2

I don't know where you heard, "The root domain has the greatest rank then passes rank to the rest of the site." but it's completely untrue. Having your pages in a subdirectory versus the root directory is not a negative ranking factor. I don't know why you can't get this website to work in the root directory but it's okay that you can't. This won't affect their pages' rankings.

Also, redirects are ok. In fact, they are very common and often times necessary. They only become bad when they're chained together. If too many redirects are chained together they will eventually stop being followed. Also, a small amount of PageRank is lost when a redirect is done but the amount is so small, and PR has so little SEO value, that it's a non-issue.