Technical question about site structure using a CMS, redirects, and canonical tag

[CHutchins]

I have a couple of sites using a particular CMS that creates all of the pages under a content folder, including the home page.  So the url is www.example.com/content/default.asp. There is a default.asp in the root directory that redirects to the default page in the content folder using a response.redirect statement and it’s considered a 302 redirect. So all incoming urls, i.e. www.example.com and example.com and www.example.com/ will go to the default.asp which then redirects to www.example.com/ content/default.asp. How does this affect SEO? Should the redirect be a 301? And whether it’s a 301 or a 302, can we have a rel=canonical tag on the page that that is rel=www.example.com? Or does that create some sort of loop? I’ve inherited several sites that use this CMS and need to figure out the best way to handle it.

[Nobody1560986989723]

That's not a great mechanism for a CMS even before you consider SEO!

Do you understand ASP sufficiently to move the default.asp to the root directory and then apply the rel=canonical?

If the actual homepage is /content/default.asp then there are two things you should probably consider

1. Make the redirect from root to /content/default.asp a 301 as it is permanently at that address, not temporarily
2. Any links you get in need to point to /content/default.asp for max effect.

(2) is really tough as it's messy for webmasters  and doesn't do your website branding any good. So, to be honest I would be looking at moving that default page to root, if the choice were mine.

Open to other opinions.

[Dr-Pete]

I do find things get weird with Google when you're home page isn't at the root, and ASP seems to often do this.

Unfortunately, if you 301-redirect to the deeper level, you shouldn't canonical back up to the root - it's a mixed signal. I'm with Martin - if you can't change it, you should probably 301-redirect to "/content/default.asp" and then use that as the canonical version as well (internal links, inbound links where possible, etc.). It's not ideal, but it may be the least worst solution.

[CHutchins]

Thanks. It confirms what I was thinking. I have asked our developers if the page can be moved to the root, but am getting a lot of pushback. So if it can't be done, I will make the canonical page the content/default.asp.