I've never done this, or found a reason to before but I do have a reason now. How is it done? I want to point www.domain.net to www.domain.com/net or net.domain.com - does it make any difference whether it's a subfolder or subdomain? and how do I do it at all?
You would want to use a 301 redirect. It looks like you want to send traffic from one domain to a new domain. If you are using cpanel, you can set the redirect up there. Assuming your host has mod-rewrite enabled, you could directly put this in your htaccess file. RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.net$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.net$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/net [R=301,L]
subdomains are considered to help better with rankings so subdomain should be better. regarding redirect, you can do it in your htaccess file or if you have cpanel, you can set it up there.
Not exactly. At present, the .net domain is forwarded (at GoDaddy) to the .com domain. Would I just change that so it's forwarded to .com/net/ or to net.domain.com? I thought of using the domain.net address as a localizing site with descriptions of a small network of sites, possibly creating a separate page for each site with outgoing links to those sites. There are actually two site-collections I was thinking of doing this with. Or is this just a dumb idea? It sounded somehow totally brilliant when I thought of it about 3 am this morning...
If you are using the domain forwarding option of godaddy, then it is what you need to do. Not a dumb idea and also the 3am idea is never dumb