Hi all, I've have been reading this forum for a while and gotten to know a little bit more about this daunting and vast subject of SEO. Now I'm a bit stuck and I would like to get some advice. I am going through my SEO procedures bit by bit and have gotten until directory submission, which led me to create a sitemap for google webmasters tool. I submitted my site (i.e http://www.fruit.com) to a site generator but when I opened the xml sitemap, I noticed all the pages listed are from one of the directory folder (http://www.fruit.com/apple) What happened was, I had a 301 redirect command in a htaccess file in the root folder, directing http://www.fruit.com to http://www.fruit.com/apple But I also had other pages for example, http://www.fruit.com/color.php and http://www.fruit.com/orange/index.php The logic for doing this was because http://www.fruit.com/apple was my wordpress blog root folder, which I wanted as my homepage. But from there, I also linked to http://www.fruit.com/color.php and http://www.fruit.com/orange/index.php color.php and orange/index.php are both not in my sitemap xml file. when I recreated a sitemap by submitting http://www.fruit.com/color.php (instead of http://www.fruit.com), I did manage to get all my pages. So my concern is (and I'm sorry if my fruit analog is a bit confusing..) is my 301 redirecting a bad SEO decision? Are there any implications or considerations I need to note of if I use this redirecting method or are there better methods? If the above methods are ok, then for my sitemap submission, I can just submit the 2nd sitemap right? .===.===.===. Secondly, while http://www.fruit.com/color.php and http://www.fruit.com/apple are linked with each other, they are of slightly different content and I was intending to market them separately, i.e submit both sites as 2 individual website address in Directories. Will I be up for any nasty surprises? like penalties by search engines? Or would 1 of my submission be treated as a duplicate and ignored? .===.===.===. I'm still new to SEO and internet marketing, I hope I'll be able to understand these concepts faster. Thanks!
any insight is appreciated. I guess the short question is, will 301 redirection within my domain directory mess up how search engines read my site? (usually 301 redirection is to redirect domain A to domain B, right? but mine's within the same domain..) Thanks!