Page hierarchy

[kushty]

Hi I guess some of you will think this is a dumb question, but, we are building a new potentially large site. They way my partner has set out the hierarchy of the site is to put the index file in the root and this acts as a redirect to the /main folder and default.aspx which is our front page.

My question is will it harm us with the search engines as I'm sure I heard that they don't like redirects. So basically, would we be better putting the default.aspx in the root folder? At the moment the index page isn't optimised and obviously doesn't have any keywords etc.

Thanks
Steve

[janhvizdak]

Originally Posted by kushty

So basically, would we be better putting the default.aspx in the root folder?

Yes. Without discussion. You already answered yourself in your post.

On the other hand, redirects don't directly harm, but they may harm. One of my pages is going upwards in rankings during last 6 weeks... And it is redirect with just few words on the page + meta refresh to "correct" URL (5 seconds) ! Honestly, I don't understand why Google does so. Now it is ranked 15-th for phrase with about 22-23K searches each month! Weird. Correct URL (where my "bad" URL redirects to) can't be found in top100 yet.

[Web Gazelle]

It is best to have your index page be your homepage and not some redirect page. Yes, put default.aspx in your root folder and make it the index page that pulls up when someone goes to your domain.

[kushty]

Ok Thanks guys for your advice. I think we would better to do it that way.