redirect homepage

[jploch]

Hey folks,

currently Iam working on a website for one of my clients and I need some advice on how to approach this in PW.
The website is for a company, that offers holiday houses in two locations. 

The client wants the homepage to show the first location. Normally I just have a home template for the first page, but here the URL should reflect that you are in Location 1. So when you visit the URL casamani.com it should redirect to casamani.com/location-1. Not sure if this makes sense at all.

Whould it be bad for SEO and performance reasons to redirect home to the Location-1 page?
Another approach would be to render the Location-1 template on the home template or do an include like discussed here.

Here is how the tree looks:

– Home

– Location 1 (Homepage)
     – Creation
     – Adventure
     – Sustainability

– Location 2 
     – Creation
     – Adventure
     – Sustainability

Thanks for looking into this!

[BitPoet]

11 minutes ago, jploch said:

Another approach would be to render the Location-1 template on the home template or do an include like discussed here.

The link above is broken.

[jploch]

1 minute ago, BitPoet said:

The link above is broken.

fixed! ?

[BitPoet]

1 hour ago, jploch said:

Whould it be bad for SEO and performance reasons to redirect home to the Location-1 page?

Not necessarily in a noticeable way, but I'd expect that it would sooner or later bite you in the backside. If another redirect happens for any reason (https upgrade, change in subdomain, etc) beforehand, Google sees two consecutive redirects when accessing / and immediately penalizes you. Outside of web apps, I try to use redirects only for two reasons: either the site moved to a different domain, or the path to a page changed.

1 hour ago, jploch said:

Another approach would be to render the Location-1 template on the home template or do an include

That's the way I would do it. And make sure that you also set a canonical header in your home page that points to the Location-1 page so search engines know to treat them as one page instead of duplicated content.

[jploch]

14 hours ago, BitPoet said:

That's the way I would do it. And make sure that you also set a canonical header in your home page that points to the Location-1 page so search engines know to treat them as one page instead of duplicated content.

That will work, exept that the URL for the homepage would be casamani.com and not casamani.com/location-1. 
Or is there any way around this? Not sure Iam thinking it through. 

[jploch]

1 hour ago, BitPoet said:

Not necessarily in a noticeable way, but I'd expect that it would sooner or later bite you in the backside. If another redirect happens for any reason (https upgrade, change in subdomain, etc) beforehand, Google sees two consecutive redirects when accessing / and immediately penalizes you. Outside of web apps, I try to use redirects only for two reasons: either the site moved to a different domain, or the path to a page changed.

Doing a redirect would be an easy solution. As I understand it, Google allows two redirects without a penalty. The only other redirect that could happen is the http to https or www to non-www. There are no subdomains planned, it's a very small website that is unlikely to grow much in the future. Do you think in this case the redirect would be ok?