Could a permanent redirect away from the root URL to /home cause the site not to be indexed?

Question

A friend of mine has a site where he allocated the content inside a folder named /home. He applied a redirection rule so that if you go to domain.com it does immediately go to domain.com/home. It is a permanent redirect since there isn't any content at the root folder.

Now, when I go to Google, Bing and Yahoo Search, and look for "site:domain.com" no pages are listed. The only page listed is the one with a link to the root folder at domain.com, and, as I mentioned above, there is no content or physical page at root, all the content is at the /home folder.

Can the permanent redirect be the reason why no pages inside /home are indexed?

EDIT:

I've gone through the index status report at Google WebMaster tools and I get this report by today. Does it say anything interesting?

Ever crawled: 2,874, Total indexed: 2, Blocked by robots: 1, Removed: 0

ABOUT SELECTED ANSWER:

As @PatomaS explains, the redirection was not be the reason why the pages where have not been indexed. It was just about time. Although, I am not sure if the redirection caused any delays on the indexation process. My friend had to wait more than 3 months to see his site in the search results, what I think was a long time.

Answer 1

The robots.txt is OK, there is no need for the Allow part, but that is still OK.

Although the domain has been registered some time ago, the content doesn't seem to be very old, or the site has almost no activity, so I'll assume that is being built or rebuilt recently.

The lack of content and the time when you sent the sitemap to the crawlers affect the indexing process, so most probably you have to wait a bit longer.

About the question itself, yes, redirects affect SEO, but not noticeably, there are many messages everywhere about the leak of juice after a 301, but as I mention and you can read, it's not relevant, even less inside your own domain/site.

Also, consider that on Goggle you have few pages, but on Bing and Yahoo there are more results, most of the results are pages with more content than the homepage and the few I checked manually, which helps you to see that search engines are more interested on content than number of pages.

Update after you question update Check the article, Index status on Google Webmaster Tools, it may help you see the difference between crawled and indexed. Or this other one, Google “Reveals Index Secrets”: Charts Indexing of Your Site Over Time on Search Engine Land.

Answer 2

By what I can tell, by the comments and the link to the site, the robots.txt is correct for the site to index the /home/ folder (I could be wrong).

Can the permanent redirect be the reason why no pages inside /home are indexed?

The 301, permanent redirect, tells the Search Engine crawlers where to go, which will be to the /home/ folder to index the site.

If you have access to edit the robots.txt file, I would suggest to change it to this to help you out some more.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /home/spa/*
Disallow: /home/eng/*

From bushing up on Robots.txt here is how it works:

1. User-Agent: * says that it is going to allow all search engines to index the website.
2. We are going to keep them from indexing the two folders which you did not want to index.

EDIT 1

By looking into the Allow which was in the robots.txt, there is no case to use Allow or is it apart of a Robots.txt file. I believe that was causing an error of your site getting index with the search engines.

Answer 3

Normally, I would say no. I am assuming that the redirect is interrupting access to the site somehow that you may not be aware of. I do not have an example of the redirect that you are using so there is a huge information vacuum in your question in that regard.

I reread everything here and I noticed that there was no redirect to answer your question. So I got busy.

Apache configuration files are either under /etc/apache2/ or /etc/local/apache2/. It is likely the files you need to edit are under /sites-available. If there is only one site on the server, the default file is the one you want to edit. Otherwise, if there are several sites, the file you want to edit will have a name format of domainname.tld.conf.

In this file, there will be a Directory directive that will point to the directory of the site. Edit this and add /home/.

If the Apache configuration files are not available to you, Here is an example redirect that may work. I have not tested it.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/home/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/home/$1 [L,R=301]

But I suspect it should work okay. You will notice that I put a condition in so that the redirect would only work where the /home directory does not exist.

Let us know how it works. I can edit the answer to update it with new ideas as we go or someone can offer a different redirect.