How do I get the root index page to redirect to a subdirectory without affecting SEO?

Question

I am reviving/reorganising my personal WordPress blog.

It's using a URL that looks like this:

http://mydomain.com/blog

The 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?

Answer 1

You could rewrite URLs internally in your root .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On

#if request is mydomain.com/something OR
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com$ [OR]

# or www.mydomain.com/something
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mydomain\.com$

# but not mydomain.com/blog
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog/

#change it to mydomain.com/blog/something
RewriteRule (.*) /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:

<?php
Header( "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