301 redirect question

[lasvegascom]

I am trying to do a 301 redirect but not sure how to do it properly. I had one page named x.htm but I removed that page and replace it with y.htm. How do I redirect x.htm to y.htm. I have my website hosted on godaddy so I cant use the .htmaccess file or any mod_rewrite. The old page is already indexed so just in case someone comes from that page I want it to go to the new page PLUS alot of the content is the same so I do not want to get hit with a dup content issue.

My only solution right now is using the meta-refresh tag which I would prefer not to do.

Any help would be greatly appreciated?

[mcanerin]

For background, I've just completed a series of articles on redirects for SEOs:

http://www.mcanerin.com/articles/301-redirect.htm

In this case, with no access to .htaccess, you need to work with the page itself.

Worse, the page is a .htm (ie static) page. If you can get the server to treat the .htm as a dynamic page you could use PHP or some other type of server scripting, but unless you can the only option you have that I can see is ye olde metarefresh. Given the other restrictions on the account, I suspect you won't be allowed to force processing, either.

The good news is that a metarefresh is not considered spam, in and of itself. Yahoo outright stated at SES that a metarefresh of 0 is treated as a 301 and a longer one is treated as a 302, for example.

I would suggest that you remove all content on x.htm, leaving only a link to y.htm and a metarefresh of 0 to y.htm. That would be a clear indication the page had moved, and leave no doubt about duplication.

I know, it sucks and it's a kludge. But apparently it actually works. Just not as well or clearly as a server side 301, because it's up to the search engine to decide whether it should be treated that way, unlike being told it is.

Ian

[lasvegascom]

Thank you for the info. What I think I may do is replace the content from the old page with the content of the new page (since the new page was not live yet) and just keep the old file name.

The benefit is that i wont have to replace any mentions of old file name with the new file name throughout the rest of the website.

[mcanerin]

That would certainly solve the issue, as well :)

Ian

[nesredep]

For background, I've just completed a series of articles on redirects for SEOs:

http://www.mcanerin.com/articles/301-redirect.htm



I read your article--very helpful. I still have one question.

I have a website at xxxx.com which was created some years ago and was very conventional; ie. home page was xxxx.com/index.html and all the pages were yyyy.html, etc.

After some time, I converted the entire site to use java servlets, and every page would have a url of this format:

xxxx.com/servlets/Page/somename

In the interests of consistency my home page was:

xxxx.com/servlets/Page/home

and it looks identical to the legacy page located at:

xxxx.com/index.html

Links from the legacy home page lead into the servlet-driven site, and links to "home" inside the side lead to the SERVLET version of the home page.

(I originally did it this way because I figured, rightly or wrongly, by leaving my legacy home page in place, it would help preserve my favorable search engine ranking)

It's kind of a pita to keep the legacy home page and servlet home page always tracking each other, so I'm thinking I should create a single 301 redirect from xxxx.com to xxxx.com/servlets/Page/home.

I gather, after a period of time, search engines will show my home page as the long ugly version, rather than the nice short version, but other than that, is there any downside to setting up a redirect from my legacy homepage?

This is something I've been mulling about for many, many months, so I really would appreciate some input before I make the move.

Thanks.

John

[mcanerin]

Actually, if you do a 301 it would be a relatively short period of time before it showed up in SERPS (basically the time for the search engine spider to come by and report back home, and for the data to be processed). It would be almost immediate for users.

Other than the longer (but correct) URLs - it would work just fine :)

Ian

[AdamS]

Hi. I'm new to SEO and multiple domains, and have a couple of relevant questions:

By employing a 301 redirect, you can actually improve your main site's rankings and links?

Our secondary domains have great keywords, but get no placement in SERPs under those keywords (ie second domain is www.guitars.com and the search term is 'guitars'). Will the 301 allow my main (ie www.flowers.com) site to show up on the SERP for 'guitars'? How exactly does the 301 work, from a results perspective?

Is the concept of creating 'micro sites' viable? Could we create a small content site hosted remotely that is designed to rank high on certain keywords? Is this a risky tactic? Does it work better/worse than simply employing a 301 redirect?

Thanks so much for your feedback.

Adam

[mcanerin]

Ouch.

Heading in the wrong direction here - let's see if I can clear some stuff up.

1. A 301 redirect only tells a search engine that the old domain is now officially the new one. This, by itself has not rankings value at all. If the old domain had a bunch of links to it, they would be combined into the total of the new domain, so that's why SEO's suggest using them. But if there are no links, then there is no benifit, as far as rankings are concerned.

2. A keyword rich domain only helps you if you have a lot of links to back it up. Keywords in your domain by themselves are not very helpful - only as part of a larger linking strategy.

3. If you did a 301 on your keyword rich domain to your main one, Google basically throws away the old one and only indexes the new one, so you would lose most of it's benifits. If you have a bunch of link building done with that domain, then you may still gain the benifit of the keyword rich anchor text, however.

4. Microsites are risky, unless done properly. They need to be genuine sites with distinct content and their own links (preferrably not shared with any of the other sites) to help at all. In most cases, you are better off just doing the linking on your main site. The only advantage a microsite has, IMO, is when your main site is so SEO UNfriendly that you have no other choice. Further, Google looks at common backlinks, whois information, IP's and several other things in order to stop duplicate and affiliate sites from showing up in the same SERP, and in practice microsites seem to be treated as either duplicates or affiliates. It's not automatic, but it's common enough that it's a risky venture unless you know exactly what you are doing. Not recommended for beginners.

Basically, if what you are trying to accomplish would look like more than one site under your control showing up in the same SERP for the same keyword, then it's very risky. If they would only show up in different SERPS for different keywords, then not very risky.

Ian

[AdamS]

Ian, very helpful stuff. A few more refined questions:

1) Our other domain names have no ranking (well, very very little) in SERPS adn hardly any links pointing to them. They were never used as a marketing vehicles. They were simply parked, sending traffic over to our main site. With this said, what is the best way to redirect these pages? Can we improve ranking by switching to another flavor of forwarding? We are not using the 301 redirect.

2) Thanks for the micro site feedback. If we go the microsite path, I plan on marketing the sites (building links) and providing unique content. However, the ultimate goal will be to send visitors to our main site (we would act like an affiliate) to transact. And yes, these micro sites would target different keywords, and show up in different SERPs than our main site.

With this said, is there a clear winner on how to leverage our large domain list? Do we redirect the majority of the domains and only create microsites for a select few domains? Will the microsites only provide a small lift compared to simply redirecting the domains?

How are the top lead gen and SEO organizations managing their long lists of domains?

Thanks again.

Adam

[AdamS]

Hi. Just checking in to see if anyone had any feedback. I'm at a crossroads (ie, use domains to create micro sites or focus efforts on our main site and not the micro site idea).

Thanks for your help.

Adam