Does the url in for your homepage impact SEO

[kcb8178]

Is there any harm to SEO having a homepage url that is not clean like www.domain.com.  For example citi uses https://online.citi.com/US/login.do  Does that matter in any way?  Would a company like citi benefit from changing to www.citi.com as their homepage?

[impactzoneco]

So long as www.citi.com points to https://online.citi.com/US/login.do, via the platform code and/or the .htaccess file, then it doesn't matter.

The primary issue is a domain name that is easy for users to type in and remember if they know the site and want to access it directly, rather than from a search engine results page. The cleaner the better. Once the user is on the site, then it is fine for the domain to point to a site in a subfolder.

For example, some WordPress users prefer to have their blog in a subfolder to keep their main directory tidy, and this is even when the blog is the purpose of the site in the first place, and not a subset of the site. It is quite common to see www.mysite.com/blog, where www.mysite.com redirects to the blog folder and that is then the index page for the website.

IOW, a user might type in "mysite.com" and then will be auto redirected to mysite.com/blog via the PHP code and the .htaccess file.

One drawback is that the location of the main site in a folder may add a small amount of latency to load times. A slight redirect as you show in your example is quite common, so search engines are used to it.

No, I don't see there being a penalty from a search engine company.

As to which is "better", you have to think through your business goals for the site and determine the best information architecture and site design for your services, products, company, or organization. That will drive the correct answer to that question.

-- Jewel