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I guess I shoulda known about Ink and redirects before this but knowing wouldn't change the problem... What's a poor SEO to do? :(
Ink may not follow your external redirects, but as long as your site's (yes, site's) backlinks are updated to point to the query-less URLs, it ought to pick them up.
Essentially, it may have to re-spider the entire site from the top down if you have backlinks only to your home page. But that's the whole point of the redirect -- to "repair" a site originally designed using hard-to-spider query strings, session IDs, etc. Some delay must be expected before the "cleanup" takes hold.
As long as all the URLs sent back to the client browser are "clean" there's nothing to worry about but the time delay... And the fact that Slurp may keep asking for those old query-string URLs for months and months and months after you've changed them and it knows about the new URLs. :(
Hang in there - it'll work.
Jim
When using redirects you might also find some odd Google behaviour for a little while, but it should come into line pretty quickly if you have enough PageRank.
<html>
<head>
<meta name="robot" content="noindex,follow">
</head>
<body>
<a href="http://www.comain.com/no/ugly/urls">Title of Page for anchor text</>
</body>
</html>
Leave that up for a few weeks / months, perhasp add some javascript or wahtever to get accidental users moved (or cloak a 301 for them), and the replace it with a 404.
Might be faster like this to get new pages in and old ones out.
SN
Example "visible" redirect (returns 200 status code):
RewriteRule ^/top/sub([0-9]+)$ /db.cgi?sub=$1 [L]
Example "silent" redirect (returns 301 status code):
RewriteRule ^/top/sub([0-9]+)$ /db.cgi?sub =$1 [R=301,L]
I suppose neither Ink nor Google should notice the silent redirect and get a 200 instead ...!?
jdMorgan, please correct me if i'm wrong.
I think you're thinking of hiding redirects in a browser address bar but I'm uncertain. I'd like to hear from Jim on this too! (Hint! Hint! :) )
Nope! I mean a proxy like rewrite rule (i have this on WebSTAR - kwel - don't know if that exists on apache mod_rewrite, though).
>I'd like to hear from Jim on this too! (Hint! Hint! :) )
waiting too ++ stop ++ stickied jim ++ stop ++ answer pending ... ;)
jdMorgan on msg #:12
[webmasterworld.com...]
The redirect is "silent"; That is, the browser thinks that it is getting the requested gif, and is not told otherwise. If you really want to send a 302 response, then change the RewriteRule flag from [L] to [R=302,L].
jdMorgan on msg #:4
[webmasterworld.com...]
If the user is typing in four different domain names and landing in your php script, then that script can just do a "silent" internal redirect and serve the requested page from the requested "domain" or "subdomain" (really a subdirectory) without doing an external 301 or 302 redirect. In other words, just translate the requested URL into a correct file path, and serve it.
... so 200 status code instead, right!?
The point here (for this specific case) is to give the majority of spiders what they want and understand - A message saying, "Hey, those old URLs full of ampersands and equal signs are history. Please use this nice, compact, tasty URL instead."
If one or another spider has a quirk you want to develop a work-around for, that's fine, but to the extent possible, stick to the standards. A 301-Moved Permanently server response is the way to go for everyone who follows the HTTP protocols.
A 301 on the Web is like a postal address change form - It's the only thing the post office will accept. Even if some disgruntled post office worker won't accept it today because it's slightly smudged doesn't mean it's not the right way to do it.
IOW, try to do this [w3.org] and this [robotstxt.org]. If that doesn't work in some isolated case, then put a band-aid on it.
OK, a response, even if it's a wacky response, gotta go... :)
Jim
