Redirecting questions

help with redirecting from old site to new one

[mcbs]

Hi Gang,
First time poster here. I have a question regarding redirecting from an old site to a new one and the pro's and cons. Here is the situation.

My brother made a site on AOL hometown several years ago. Due to that site being on the net so long, most of the keywords used in the meta tags show up in the top 5 listings on Google and MSN, to name a few. I don't know how it happened, but it did. Some of those keywords are related to a new business venture we have started, using a new company name and domain.

I want to know the best way to get visitors to go from members.aol.com/theoldsite to www.thenewsite.com? I'm pretty sure I would use the meta refresh command on the AOL pages but before I do that, I thought I would ask what else I need to do, if anything.

The goal of course is to capitalize on the high keyword ranks offered from the old site by sending visitors to the new site, without being penalized by the SE's for duplication. The new site has some of the same meta tags as the old one.

Thanks for your assistance!!

Dan

[toadhall]

*bump*

[korkus2000]

I would add a link to the top of your pages telling your users your site has moved. Redirects might hurt your SE placement. This to me as a user would not be that much of a request. This will also add PR to your new site. It also might hurt the old sites PR. Keep your old content on those old pages until you feel your new url can break away on its own.

Another way to do it would be to use javascript redirect in an external js file. I am not really sure how that will effect search engine placement.

I have heard nothing but bad things about the meta refresh tag and search engines. Maybe someone else has some better ways to get your traffic to your new site.