PR assigned to root domain?

[needhelp]

I am moving my site from www.widgets.com/blah to www.widgets.com (dropping the /blah). (I'm changing hosts, too.)

Currently, Google shows www.widgets.com/blah in SERPS.

Since my root domain of www.widgets.com will not be changing, will my PR and position in SERPS be affected once Google starts indexing my new site at www.widgets.com (using an Apache redirect from old site to new)? Is it like changing to a totally new domain even though I'm just dropping the /blah? My internal page names are changing too, but my main concern is my homepage.

THANKS!

[ratboy]

I just changed my site in this way, and what happens is that google jumps back and forth between the two versions it has cached for a while, maybe a month, then I assume finally switches over to your new version, that can be confusing to your visitors so you want to make sure to put in an immediate, zero second redirect to the new url somewhere, maybe in a page missing .htaccess file or something. That is transparent to the user, and after a month or so google will have your new site indexed. Since other search engines take much longer to register such changes, you probably want to leave that up for a while, I think anyway, unless there is something wrong with doing that.

[ciml]

You will be switching to a completely new URL, needhelp. The fact that it's on the same domain shouldn't make a difference.

A 301 redirect is probably your best approach (site search [searchengineworld.com] should offer much discussion on the topic). Hopefully, you'll get the backlinks credited to the new address.