[Q] Homepage URL with Link Building in mind: example.com vs. example.com/en

[dekhajam]

I'm pretty interested in your viewpoint.

My website is mainly written in English but I want to keep the option to extend the site later with other languages.

At the moment I 301-redirect from example.com to example.com/en
(Nginx rewrite doesn't work because of the progressive web app - don't want to bore you with details)

[Q1] How bad is that 301 redirect in terms of link building?

I mean, a backlink which isn't redirected would be ideal - ok.
If I build backlinks on my own, I could take care about that and link directly to example.com/en.

[Q2] But how about users which only link to example.com because they don't care/know about the language tag? I know, "link juice" is passed (slightly weakened) to target URL but am I missing some potential with this kind of setup?

 

[TheGreyMatter]

Why not keep English as default so the page for English would be yoursite.com?
And if a customer chooses another language, you can always add yoursite.com/gb or yoursite.com/ch depending upon whatever language you choose.
This won't dilute the link juice, keep your rankings intact and won't affect your SEO at all.

 

[Unreliable Witness]

From a brand point of view, it will be easier to gain links to variants of your domain "www.domain.com", "domain.com", "https://www.domain.com" than it will be to get links to a language specific directory.

So I would keep the English as the default language and provide directories for other languages once you have them.

Redirects aren't generally a problem in SEO unless you start chaining them.

Bear in mind that the root URL (www.domain.com) is the only URL that you won't later be able to change the links for. With any other URL (such as www.domain.com/index.php), if you don't like the links, you can 404 the URL. So if you're building links that aren't squeaky clean, build them to a URL that you could afford to lose.

 

[GrizzlyBeardMan]

Why not keep English as default so the page for English would be yoursite.com?
And if a customer chooses another language, you can always add yoursite.com/gb or yoursite.com/ch depending upon whatever language you choose.
This won't dilute the link juice, keep your rankings intact and won't affect your SEO at all.

Agree. It's probably best to keep the default language under .com

If you have other site language now or in the future, they go under .com/es for example.

If you can avoid redirects it's best to do so.

 

[dekhajam]

Thanks for your inputs - really appreciate that.

 

[dekhajam]

Why not keep English as default so the page for English would be yoursite.com?

When I was experimenting with PWAs I had troubles during initializing & fetching content in default language, therefore I added the language slug.
In retrospect, I totally agree with your thoughts, I guess the disadvantage wouldn't be that bad.
I'll keep it in mind for my next project