Handling Redirects + SEO

[Mandy Singh <mandys@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I would like some help in understanding how redirects work.

I have a main site www.mainsite.com and a microsite www.microsite.com.

All my rankings should be determined by mainsite.com.

However, we didn't think about it earlier and now microsite.com and mainsite.com have divided traffic and hence rankings are lower.

We want to consolidate the two.

I know about 301 redirects and ideally I could have done -

    RewriteEngine ON
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mainsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]    

So, www.microsite.com/about/index.php would go to www.mainsite.com/about/index.php and my rankings would be accounted for as its a permanent redirect.

However, this would mean I need to move all my pages "physically" from microsite to mainsite.

Is there another alternative wherein I keep all my pages on microsite (still have same directory structure) but call them using mainsite.com domain?

Am I making sense?

Let me know.

Thanks.