steps to be taken when uploading site's files to a subfolder?

[abduraooft]

Hello everybody,

I find it easy to upload all files & folders of a site to a sub-folder of the root, so that I can keep my files separated from the default folders which come with website like cgi-bin, modlogan etc.
Then I add a meta tag in the root's index file to redirect to the required home page.

Anything wrong with this approach? What are the steps to be taken in this scenario to increase hits by search robots?

regards,
art.

[Pennimus]

Yes, everything is wrong with this approach.

You should perform the redirect on the server side using PHP, ASP or htaccess.

[abduraooft]

Thanks Pennimus,
Could you please give some more hints to compare these two methods? If I use PHP, it'll be header() function, isn't?

[Pennimus]

Yes, one header() to send the HTTP response, and one to declare the new location. All can be found in the PHP manual.

[abduraooft]

Actually I used this meta on my understanding(mis?) about meta tags in past.
All that I required was to put its meta-descriptor in the root's index file, at the same time the users should get the specified files in the subdirectory(using meta-refresh) and thus whenever the website is listed in SEs like Google, the description would be showed along with my site name www.mydomain.com instead of www.mydomain.com/myfolder/myfile.

Now my concern is whether this header() will serve all the above requirements? (I know meta-descriptor is no more considered by robots and I'll aim for the content only)

[Pennimus]

No it won't, if you use a server side redirect the engines will list the redirect target instead of the root.