Redirects Affecting Spiders Happiness- Any/301

Immediately redirecting user to another folder on same domain.

[jerryleelewis]

I recently bought some ASP.NET server space and the only way I can run many domains each with their own application is to place each one in a new folder.
For this to work, when a visitor comes into my site at www.domain.com, I need the page to redirect the use to www.domain.com/Shop

My question is: How do I do this, without it causing problems in terms of SE Spidering and future PageRank?

I don't have a PageRank to retain as this is a new site. I've heard the Meta-Refresh is not the way forward. I've heard about the 301 redirect - which sound more favourable. With a 301 I am imagining that google will not spider to the www.domain.com after it finds this 301 redirect and simply always goto the www.domain.com/Shop first.

I guess, in the future it is more than likely that I will run a site that runs directly from www.domain.com and planting a 301 in googles lists, would not fair well in the future.

Any thoughts would be most appreciated.

Cheers

[mincklerstraat]

This may sound like a no-brainer, but maybe nonetheless something worth considering. I really don't like the idea of any kind of redirect from your main domain to your main content, so one thing you could do is just set up a page on your main domain that points to /Shop with some info about your /Shop, and you could also place links in various places to your main /Shop/categories with anchortexts reflecting your keywords. I'd guess this would be better in preserving pagerank. You then could decide if you want the 'home' links in your /Shop app to point to /Shop, or to the main domain - pointing to the main domain would be much, much better.