Redirection Question

What does google follow...

[whitem59]

While discussing Google spidering with a friend the other day, an interesting question came up.

If there is an inbound link to mysite.com from yoursite.com but I redirect visitors from the referrer yoursite.com to mysite.com/yoursitereffer.html based on the referrer header (.htaccess), which site will googlebot see?

Assuming it sees and reads mysite.com, no problem - that is what I want.

Assuming it sees and reads mysite.com/yoursitereffer.html, is there another way to redirect the visitor from yoursite.com to mysite.com/yoursitereffer.htm that would allow googlebot to spider mysite.com?

TIA for any advice on this one all.

[amoore]

Googlebot doesn't pass referer headers, so if you're using that to decide when to redirect googlebot won't get redirected.

[WebGuerrilla]

If you give Google a 301 or 302, it will follow the redirect and index the final page.

If your redirect is based soley on the referring url, then Google would not be redirected because as
amoore pointed out, Googlebot doesn't pass any referral data.

But keep in mind that not all browsers will pass referral data, so there will be some visitors who click on the link who won't end up at mysite.com/yoursitereffer.html

[whitem59]

Hey:

Many thanks guys, that was the information I was looking for - EXACTLY

[whitem59]

Of course, an reply to my exact question begets another question.

What is the best redirection method for redirection a specific referrer (one) that is not an SE that will not affect SE spidering? Is it:

Java: Seems to risky for me regarding SEs
cgi: same problem as Java
.htaccess referrer redirect - seems to be pretty safe
ssi includes - but will the proper content be spidered (meaning my main page, not the one I am sending one non-se referrer to)

Just curious what yall think.

I would love to use ssi, but am afraid the spiders will not crawl the include page.

Thanks again