: Could a permanent redirect away from the root URL to /home cause the site not to be indexed? A friend of mine has a site where he allocated the content inside a folder named /home. He applied

@Sherry384

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 ^(.*)$ www.example.com/home/ [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.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Yeniel560

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.

Vote Up Vote Down