What do I do with old zen cart directory after upgrade?

[DrByte]

Much simpler approach:

1. Domain Registrar: this is just a domain name, with nameservers set to your hosting company's nameserver values. NO FORWARDING.
2. Hosting company: website is set up to "point to" your public_html/fred/ folder (whatever "fred" is for your flavor of the month folder preference, "store", "catalog", etc)
3. .htaccess - nothing
This way your customers access your site by visiting "www.your_domain.com" and that'll automatically push them into your "fred" folder transparently ... they'll never even know about the "fred" folder cuz that becomes the "top" of the website structure if you do as I described in #2 here.

Granted, I don't usually recommend using a "fred" folder at all, because that just creates all this confusion you're encountering now. If you used no foldername (ie: "store" or "catalog") and none of these "redirects" you're doing, all this mess would be moot.
The benefit of this is no SEO messes.

[BlackOrchidCouture]

If you mean you've set your domain to point to public_html/store then I guess I kinda understand, but you're describing it oddly, and if indeed you've got the webroot pointed to something other than public_html then either you're using inappropriate forwarding to do it, or all this redirecting is entirely unnecessary in the first place.

Because the hosting companies make it possible to redirect your URL to point to a specific folder, and it's so easy to do that way, I guess I assumed that's the way it was done. 301 redirects through .htaccess are new to me, I only started looking into this when I realized that having had my whole store in a folder named /catalog and now having it all in /store might have messed things up in terms of old indexed links. Now I'm understanding that this might be the more correct way to do a redirect, but it's not working for all the variations of my url that I type in, including the most important one, my simple url. Actually that's the only one it's not working for. I'm just trying to understand how the code I put in the .htaccess is working for all the ways except if I type www.mysite.com. Don't know if this explains it any better or not, but thank you for taking the time to look over my post!

[BlackOrchidCouture]

Oops, I hadn't seen your second post. Ok, I just redirected it through my hosting company and now it's all working correctly. Thanks!

I guess I don't understand, the directions for installing Zen Cart say to create a folder such as /store or /catalog and put all the files in there. But you are saying it would have been best to put all the files in the public_html folder?

[DrByte]

Oops, I hadn't seen your second post. Ok, I just redirected it through my hosting company and now it's all working correctly. Thanks!

I guess I don't understand, the directions for installing Zen Cart say to create a folder such as /store or /catalog and put all the files in there. But you are saying it would have been best to put all the files in the public_html folder?

Those instructions are for people who don't understand the concepts of "public_html" and "webroots" and how to identify the folder where their Zen Cart store is at ... giving them instructions to use a name that's obvious to them gives them a clue of something to hold onto while they're going for the ride of learning something completely new.

When one's comprehension of how websites work grows and one becomes ready to make adjustments, those initial instructions become more of a reference than a rigid structure.

There are LOTS of different ways to set up a website. The supplied initial installation instructions offer "one" approach for choosing a location for installation. Alter as required to suit your needs.

[BlackOrchidCouture]

Do you think I should move my site into public_html? It's still early in the game for me, and if it really is the best thing for SEO and simplicity I'll do it. But if it's best to just stick to a directory I'll do that instead....

[DrByte]

If you're setting your site's webroot to the /store/ folder then that's no different SEO-wise than relocating the files to the public_html folder and resetting the webroot to public_html.
You're welcome to do either.
Moving the files involves a little bit of reconfiguring: https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/i...hp?article=122

[BlackOrchidCouture]

Ok, thanks so much!