Is it possible to redirect from a freeserver?

want 301, but no access to.htaccess

[mirrornl]

I have a nice performing website on a free server, on wich i have obviously no acces to the .htaccess.
Now i would like to redirect - 301 - this site to one on my own domain.
Is this possible?

[encyclo]

It all depends on the free server company and how their server is set up. Do they allow .htaccess (unlikely), can you use a scripting language such as PHP, can you use an .asis file as the index page...?

Most free hosting companies allow static HTML and that's it. If that's the case, then it is unlikeley that you can use a 301.

[mirrornl]

Ty Encyclo...

That about answers my question....

They don't allow .htaccess, nor php or cgi.

Never heard about a asis file before now

sigh...

[g1smd]

What I did when I needed to do this, was to alter all of the internal site navigation on the old site so that it all linked straight to the new site.

You could get to any page of the old site if you knew the URL for it, but as soon as you clicked on ANY navigation on the old site, you were transported to the requested page on the NEW site.

The new site and the old site has exactly the same URL structure and exactly the same page names (but the new site also had a few new pages).

Google picked up the new site within days and started listing it. The old site had a <meta robots noindex> tag added at the time the links were changed and Google delisted the old site within weeks.

[mirrornl]

good idea g1smd !

but the old site is nicely aged (7 years) and i wanted to transport the pr to the new site,
would all the links pointing to the new site do it the same as a301?

[mirrornl]

om second thoughts g1smd....

this free site is a bit to big to rebuild on a new site.

actually my question is about only one page on this old free site,(my best performing page of all pages on all my sites) wich has no links to other pages on this website, except the sitemap wich is also aged and with good pr.

because it is such a good page, i rather had more control over it

guess i have to learn to live with it

[mirrornl]

any other ideas?

[Marshall]

Do you access to meta tags? Put in a redirect:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;Url=http://yourdomain">

If you want it to be instant, set the content="number is seconds; URL"> to zero.

[mirrornl]

Thank yoy Marshall,

but doesn't Google devalue meta refreshes?

will i transfer the pr of the old page to the new one this way?

[Marshall]

mirrornl,

I have used this trick in the past for two customers of mine who started on free servers then went to paid ones. In those cases, I also included a robots meta tag noindex,nofollow. It has been a few years since I have done this, so I do not think I am qualified to give you an answer. I sugget submitting the question in the SEO forum. I'd be curious to now what the answer is.

Just an FYI - when I did this before, and agian it's been several years, I did change the links on the free server page to be absolute URL's to the new site. However, with the noindex,nofollow tag, I am not sure if any robots followed them or not.

Marshall

[g1smd]

You would need the noindex attribute, but using nofollow would be a very bad idea.

[Jane_Doe]

In the past I have also had to move a site from a place where I could not use a redirect to new domain. I ended up just starting over and asking people to change their links to the new domain name. Most of the more important links got updated and it worked out okay.

[mirrornl]

thank you all,

i wont be able to get the best backlinks updated....

i'll think it over again, if, how and what to do...