Meta tag forwarding and search engines

[RemyXO]

[domain.com...]
[Used Meta Tags: FORWARDS To]
[domain.com...]

Now, if i submit my site to search engines with "http://domain.com"
will it some how affects my page ranking or might even get banned?

[physics]

Personally I wouldn't do this with meta tags (for worries about search engine spiders like you mentioned). I'd do a rewrite or 301 permanent redirect. Are you using apache?

[RemyXO]

(sorry for the delay in reply)

yes, i do use it.
would you be able to help me please?
:)

[physics]

It should be as simple as creating a file named .htaccess in your web directory and putting the following lines in it (but mod_rewrite has a tendency to not be simple!)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^/*$ /forums/portal.php
RewriteRule ^/*index\.html?$ /forums/portal.php

Disclaimer: This is untested, test it first! Check the Apache URL Rewriting Guide [httpd.apache.org] if it doesn't work right.
This will rewrite requests for the home page to the forums page. Try all permutations of the home page when testing, i.e. http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.htm

[RemyXO]

this works, but the only problem is that the images does not show up correctly becasue its linked to /forums/images/
and it shows as /images/

is there a way around this too?

[physics]

Do you have control over the image paths in the forum? I.e. if you set the path to be absolute like <img src="/forums/images/foo.jpg"> then I would think it would show up OK even with that rewrite...

Or you can symlink the images directory in your www dir to forums/images maybe ... like
ln -s forums/images images
on the command line (if you're not using the images dir already that is).

[RemyXO]

something like this?

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^/*$ /forums/portal.php
RewriteRule ^/*index\.html?$ /forums/portal.php

RewriteBase /images/
RewriteRule ^/*$ /forums/images/
RewriteRule ^/*images?$ /forums/images/

[physics]

I'm not sure ... does it work when you test it? I've always left the RewriteBase as / and then set the rules from there but if what you have works then hey it works ;) Check out RewriteCond to deal with the images dir if what you have doesn't work.

[RemyXO]

Nope, it didn't work, but I was hoping you was going to say "you was close, very close" LOL

Yeah, i'll look in to it after the weekends, going camping. :D

Thanks for your help!
:)