If I move website HTML pages to an "en" directory, will this affect website SEO ranking?

Question

We want to localize our website to several languages. The website is a collection of static HTML pages in English.

We are going to put pages for each language in an individual directory: en, de, it... This way it is more convenient to refer shared resources like CSS rules and JavaScript files. That is we will move all current English pages to "en" directory.

To preserve old links to our pages we will add a Rewrite rule to .htaccess, like this one

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yowindow.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://yowindow.com/en/$1 [L,R=301]

I'm afraid this change may affect our SEO rankings.

Will it?

Pasha

Answer 1

No. As long as every previously-working address is redirected to a now-working address with the 301 status code, you will not lose out.

Note if you have access to the main server config it is simpler to do a redirect using a virtual host and Redirect than hacking mod_rewrite. eg.:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.yowindow.com
    Redirect permanent / http://yowindow.com/en/
</VirtualHost>

(If you can remove the need for .htaccess-checking in each directory you will also improve performance a little.)