Will a redirect affecting listing?

rpain · 08-03-2007, 08:01 AM

Hi,

My client has a site which has done very well in the past due to a lot of press coverage. Recently she rebranded the site to a new address so I set up a forwarder on the domain name to go to the new site. Anyhow, she tells me that a lot of people still know the old address and when they type it into google the site no longer comes up and cheeky competitors have nicked our keywords and come up first under that address.

I've created a small subsite to go on that address again with some texts that she has provided with plenty of keywords but my client would like the homepage to automatically redirect to the new site (with a meta refresh). Will the search engines see this and consiquently not rate the site well? I've added a link on the homepage to the new site but she doesn't have a lot of faith in her customers and thinks that they may not click though. If I give the link to the site this post will probably be listed so I'll leave it out for now (made that mistake before).

Thanks,

Richard

Webfu · 08-03-2007, 02:01 PM

If it was my project, I would prolly take that meta refresh tag out, and replace it with a 301 permanent redirect.

Webfu · 08-03-2007, 02:02 PM

Matt Cutts talks a little about that here - it could shed some light on the subject for you - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-ad...onicalization/

rpain · 08-06-2007, 02:48 AM

Hi- I didn't know anything about 301 redirects or even how to implement them. That's something I'm going to try to work out this morning. I'm using Lighttpd instead of Apache so I think there are some issues.

Anyhow, the main question was whether google would see the redirect and consequently forget about crawling the site.

Thanks, Richard

harsha22 · 08-06-2007, 03:17 AM

Do a 301 redirect from the old domain to new domain.

coolguy27 · 08-08-2007, 01:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rpain

Hi,

My client has a site which has done very well in the past due to a lot of press coverage. Recently she rebranded the site to a new address so I set up a forwarder on the domain name to go to the new site. Anyhow, she tells me that a lot of people still know the old address and when they type it into google the site no longer comes up and cheeky competitors have nicked our keywords and come up first under that address.

I've created a small subsite to go on that address again with some texts that she has provided with plenty of keywords but my client would like the homepage to automatically redirect to the new site (with a meta refresh). Will the search engines see this and consiquently not rate the site well? I've added a link on the homepage to the new site but she doesn't have a lot of faith in her customers and thinks that they may not click though. If I give the link to the site this post will probably be listed so I'll leave it out for now (made that mistake before).

Thanks,

Richard

Don't use meta refresh SEs dislikes it... The Refresh META Tag is not a META tag which should be used on pages you submit to search engines. Most search engines have algorithms that will detect the Refresh tag and may either setup their system to ignore the particular page, your entire site or may even ban your host entirely...

Instead use 301 redirect....