Redirecting URLs to new URLs

Redirecting URLs within the same domain

[teenwolf]

What is the most search-engine-friendly way to redirect a url within a domain? Simply a meta tag?
For example -- home.html redirected to index.html.

There are a number of ways to do this, but I am hoping for the most search-engine-friendly way to do this in your experience.

[Marcia]

Definitely not meta refresh. Use a 301 permanent redirect, that's the recommended way.

Are you Apache or IIS?

[Vulcan315]

What would the best method for this be? I currently use a string in my .htaccess file that looks like this:

redirect 301 /index.html [example.com...]

Should I have the word "permanent" in there, somewhere?

Thanks,
Dave

[edited by: Woz at 10:30 am (utc) on Oct. 15, 2004]
[edit reason] fixed URL [/edit]

[xcandyman]

No 301 means permanent, as 302 is temporary

And welcome to WebmasterWorld!

[Vulcan315]

Thankyavurymuch!

Dave

[Vulcan315]

Oh... I did have one more question about this topic... When a 301 is used, and the SE comes around to do it's thing at the old URL, will it automatically jump to the new place and continue to crawl the site, or does it come to a halt?

I have a domain (URL) hosted on one of Interland's servers, but the actual website is in a sub-dir at a different provider. I can't move the domain from interland to the top dir of the site where the actual site lives (another domain is currently hosted there), and I don't want to move the site over to the interland server (big site with shopping cart, etc)

Does the 301 that I have on the Interland server work in this situation to efectively redirect the SE to the actual site address so the site can be crawled?

Perplexed,
Dave

[Vulcan315]

...in addition to msg #6 above...how about if I simply go to the DNS records and point the domain directly at the old website location, as opposed to using the 301 redirect from the interland server where it's hosted to the old location? Is that better?

Dave

[Vulcan315]

Sorry to keep adding to this thread..but here's what I've just done... I went to the DNS settings for the domain name, and edited the "A" record to point it directly to the server where the website resides... Now I don't need a redirest, the domain simply pulls the site up right away.

Now, for the website, I have two different domains that will bring up the same site (both have the DNS "A" records pointed to the same ip address/server space...

www.domain1.com
www.domain2.com

Is there a problem with this, and will the SE's downgrade this type of setup? I was concerned that the SE's wouldn't jump from one server to another and actually crawl the site.

Thanks, and sorry for the noise!
Dave