301 redirect for home/index page

[Jon-WebsiteCM]

The problem is you have your entire store in the "catalog" folder. I assume you did this to try and retain the links when you moved from the html catalog to DSEFU.

Instead, move it back to the root directory by doing the following:

1. Log into your admin section and move your images location from the file system, to the database.

2. Transfer all your files out of the "catalog" directory, into your root directory. Ensure there is no index.html in this root directory.

3. Open config.php and find:

$xcart_web_dir ="/xcart";

Remove /xcart so it looks like:

$xcart_web_dir ="";

4. Log back into your admin section, and move your images location from the database back to the file system.

Then redirect your old links using this code in an .htaccess file [will also ensure that your domain always uses the www] (substitute yourdomain.com):

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

You also need to ensure that home.php is loaded when the domain is loaded, since there is no index.html, and as by default x-cart tries to do a redirect from index.php to home.php (which isn't even a 301 redirect). You can do this with this code in .htaccess:

DirectoryIndex home.php index.html index.php index.htm

I'll address your ticket with us during business hours tomorrow.

[bj]

I admit to not being familiar with X-Cart, but most good quality carts have an rss feed of some sort. Rather than redirecting or changing things in a major way, with the possibility of a SERP drop, why don't you research a way to use magpie or one of the other rss tools to pull stuff from your cart into your static homepage? It would seem to give you the best of both worlds, since then it wouldn't require updating of the now not so static homepage, it would be refreshed automatically.

And if you then need to run php code in your otherwise static homepage you'll also need to do some htaccess magic to allow php code to run in a file with an htm(l) extension so you don't change the filename (and take a SERP hit.)

Anyway, it's just a thought.

[Milo]

O.K. I think the point here is its not advisable to redirect the index page to a dynamic page and get a better result. The X-cart issues are a side note, but thanks for all the help and input guys.
Warm regards.