Homepage Redirect Blues

[netrafic]

I have a client that has to redirect their entire home page to a new dynamic page URL when the root URL is visited. It is a portal site operated by a newspaper. When i use a spider to crawl the home page, like a search engine would, there is of course nothing to crawl and am assuming that when the spiders see the refresh tag will just high tail it out of there. Any ideas, workarounds that one can think of?

Chris in Colorado

[stricko]

Why do they have to have a redirect, can't you just point the domain to a new site and have autonomous URL's?

[jdMorgan]

Chris,

I'd recommend a server 301-Moved Permanently redirect, not a meta refresh or JavaScript refresh. Second choice is an internal server redirect to a page with somne content if this is some sort of directory-structure policy limitation. If there's no content on the page the URL points to, you're not going to do very well in the SERPs without doing something!

Jim