Root domain *Example.com 301 Redirects to *example.com/n/ - Good? Bad?

[btclark]

I have a client with a site, example.com that has a 301 to example.com/n/. The subdirectory landing page has a PR of 4 (i know pr doesn't matter THAT much anymore).

They also have old versions of the site appearing under www*example.com/index.html (PR 3)
and
http:||example.com/index.html (PR 3)

Am I correct in thinking that the /index.html pages should redirect to the new version of the site at the /n/ subdirectory? Or should I get them off of using the /n/ page altogether and get everything pointing back to example.com?

All inbound links point to example.com, so I'm not sure if they are losing PR because of this.

[tedster]

It is not always easy to tell if a site is losing juice from a specific canonical issue these days. For that reason, it is best to handle everything you can on your own server.

I would strongly encourage anyone in this situation to serve the home page at the domain root with no redirects, and to redirect any requests for index.html (default.asp etc) to the root as well. Beyond that, you're guessing and just hoping for the best.

[jdMorgan]

You should change the /n redirect to an internal rewrite (mod_rewrite on Apache, ISAPI Rewrite on IIS if available) so that /n is not visible to clients in the URLs, and 301-redirect /index.xyz requests to example.com/ -- to include redirecting /subdir/index.xyz to example.com/subdir/

There's simply no reason to 'carry around' that superfluous /n or "/index.xyz" in the URLs.

If there are hundreds of URLs with the "/n" in them, then you may want to change --and 301-redirect-- only a few at a time to avoid "shocking" the search engines with massive changes and causing your ranking to suffer -- albeit temporarily.

For any given 'page' of content or document, or any 'included object' such an an image that you want to rank well, there should be one and only one URL that can be used to directly reach that content -- all variations of that one URL of any kind whatsoever (http/https, www/non-www, FQDN/non-FQDN, appended-port-number/no-port-number, uppercase/lowercase/mixed-case, query-string/no-query-string, query-parameter-order variants) should 301-redirect to the one canonical URL.

To minimize headaches and maximize ranking potential, run that server like a very tight ship. :)

Jim

[btclark]

Tedster - thank you very much for your input.

jdMorgan - Thanks so much. I'm going to bring some of this info to my client, but the problem is they are data driven and so need numbers to back up my suggestion. Ah well. Thanks again.

[jdMorgan]

Tell them they can easily find "the numbers" by doing a search on "www.google.com/n/index.html" -- That's a "standard" URL, right?

But seriously, how many "major sites" have a kludge like that in their URLs? The number is zero.

Jim