Move Zen from folder to Root? Is it better for SEO? and MODS?

[niccol]

Firstly, yes I know that I have made a tactical error The reason is simple when I started out I didn't realise how many options for extra pages and features Zen Cart has. So, that is a big hug for the developers.

I now have zen cart in a subdirectory cunningly called 'shop'.

I run, among others, the following mods:

• Ceon URI mapping
• Wordpress on Zen
• Easy populate

At the moment I have realised that it is better for the home page to be part of Zen Cart because then the links are all updated when a new category is added either in Zen itself or in Wordpress. So what I have done is transfer the original home page, which was outside zen in the root, to the front page of the shop. I then implemented a 301 from the original position to the new position.

Which works fine functionally.

From a SEO perspective, I am not sure. I think that I am OK with this configuration. Does anyone have any advice? There aren't many incoming links yet anyway and I have given the SEs an appropriate sitemap. Ideas?

My gut feeling is that I would be happier to move the installation to root. But maybe there is really no need and I do not want to fix something that is not broken. I have read the tutorials and forum entries and can see what to do. Are there any special things that I need to think about regarding the mods I have installed?

Thanks guys....

if it helps then the URL is www.starlessriver.com

[gjh42]

Technically you're probably fine where you are, but for customer comfort I think it would be good to be in the root to make the URL as clean as possible. I built my first shop in a subfolder and moved it to the root after more than a year, with a 301 redirect. With decent Google page position for a number of keywords, I didn't notice any real difference in traffic and Google search results didn't seem to suffer. There was a flurry of SE activity for several days as they updated their info.

[niccol]

Thanks Glenn. Exactly the advice I need.

Is there any reason why I can't run the two installations side by side until crossing over? Accessing the new index.php might be tricky with the divert still in place but I should be able to jump in anywhere else. Just a thought.

[gjh42]

If you have a 301 from the root to a subfolder, you can't actually get to the root at all (unless there is a twist to your 301 setup that I don't know about). You would have to remove the first 301 to use the parallel sites, then put in the 301 from sub to root when you want to use that only.