I am reviving/reorganising my personal WordPress blog.It's using a URL that looks like this:http://mydomain.com/blogThe webserver 301 redirects www.mydomain.com to mydomain.com.I want to use the blog subdirectory because I plan to add other parts to the site, with the blog only being one part of the site.However, at the moment there is nothing there but the blog, so I want to have the root index page redirect to the blog for the time being.I have been using this on the root index.html page to do the redirect...<meta http-equiv=REFRESH content=0;url=./blog>...but this seemed to have stopped the site being indexed by Google and Bing.How do I do this without affecting SEO?  Also, what URL should I put in the sitemap.xml?
How do I get the root index page to redirect to a subdirectory without affecting SEO?
seo;redirects
You could rewrite URLs internally in your root .htaccess file.RewriteEngine On#if request is mydomain.com/something ORRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com$ [OR]# or www.mydomain.com/somethingRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mydomain\.com$# but not mydomain.com/blogRewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog/#change it to mydomain.com/blog/somethingRewriteRule (.*) /blog/$1 [R=301]Or, if you want to apply a temporary solution till you develop the other parts of site, you could place an index.php in the root with this following code:<?phpHeader( HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently ); Header( Location: http://www.mydomain.com/blog ); ?>Benefits of this approach is that no present/possible messing up of URLS. And it is simpler than .htaccess approach. Also this will tell Google that this page moved permanently ( or temorary with 302) to this new location. (Although [R=301] in .htaccess would have done same thing.)Here is a discussion about 301 & 302 redirects by Matt Cutts