Contributions

When choosing any of these equally acceptable methods it is worth noting a few things:

1) my earlier post doesn't take ages to redirect see example: http://www.bikesuperstore.co.uk

which redirects to /catalog/

2) using .htaccess files to redirect is not liked by many search engines who fail to follow through on redirection.

My prefered method which is used on bikesuperstore.co.uk is the outlined below
NOTE: NO FILE IN THIS PACKAGE

Add the following line to the file called .htaccess in your root directory:
"redirect 301 /index.php http://www.company.com/catalog/index.php"

If you don't have .htaccess file, create one.

Good luck!

Reference the attached file for proper redirect procedure.

Bobby

All as I've done is delete the "SOF and EOF <-- tags to stop header errors.

You can just create a file call index.php with the code:
<?
header("Location: catalog/index.php");
?>
making sure there are no whitespaces after th ?>

Like most first time users, I installed oscommerce to the default directory of /catalog/.
I placed a simple redirect in the primary root to direct viewers to the /catalog/ directly.
That's where my trouble began.

Problems I encountered were:

#1 - even with a 0 for refresh content time, this seems to show the viewer a blank page for a moment. Not what I wanted for a storefront start!

#2 - I noted search engine spiders and my rating were not up to par and discovered through some research that redirects are not the way to go
for spidering to be effective.

See the simple text file for solution!