How can I redirect from an old site

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How can I redirect from an old site

moroose

9:27 am on Oct 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hi!
I had an old site that i built in 2004 and then forgot it.
since then it gained fair traffic.It looks bad and pathetic but at least google found its way to it 4 years ago,which my new fancy 6 months new site couldnt so far.
Now I want anyone visiting that site be directed to another new site am building.How would i do that while keeping seo.
old address:
[oldsite.freehost.com...]
New site:
[newsite.com...]

the first one has an index.html
the current has an index.php

Well,I need a way to redirect inside the html page as the plan for this old page does not allow htaccess

Thank you very much in advance.

Marshall

9:57 am on Oct 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

You could use a meta refresh tag in the <head>:

If you are using xHTML, do not forget the closing /. The number in content="n;url" is second. If you want it instantaneous, set it to zero. And it is wise to have a link on the page stating to the effect:

"This page has been moved. If you are not automatically forwarded, click here." This is in case the meta refresh does not work.

Marshall

jdMorgan

12:44 pm on Oct 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

Also, be aware that a meta-refresh is not a redirect. It's effect depends on the client's bahaviour, and unfortunately, this behaviour is poorly-documented by search engines except for Yahoo.

Jim

g1smd

3:02 pm on Oct 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

What I did when I needed to move a site from an old freehost to a proper hosted solution was this:

The whole new site was uploaded to the new server and then the old site was modified in a very specific way.

Every page of the old site had the navigation bar changed so that it referenced only pages on the new site.

So, if you looked at any page of the old site, every link you clicked would magically transport you to the correct page on the new site. There was no way to get from one page of the old site to another page of the old site through the internal navigation.

Once Google started picking up the new site, every page of the old site had this meta tag added: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.

Google still spiders and caches such pages, and also follows the links off those pages to wherever they point. The "noindex" tag simply removes such pages from the SERPs after a few weeks.

After a few weeks Google had almost fully listed the new site, and had almost completely dropped the old site. The new site also ranked a bit higher than the old one had.

g1smd

3:14 pm on Oct 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

>> the first one has an index.html <<
>> the current has an index.php <<

That should not matter at all. You should never mention the actual index file filename in any link on the site. The URL should simply have a trailing / on the end.