JavaScript Redirect

is it allowed?

[kullthevaluzian]

I have moved my site to another directory and I redisigned one. Now I don't to lose my traffic because I've got a pretty good PR for my old site and I put the "location..." commamd in JavaScript to redirect the traffic to the new directory. The content of new site is almost exactly the same as the old one. Can I be penalized for that?

Kitaro

[James_Dale]

Javasacript redirects are almost always penalised eventually, usually sooner rather than later. Google would normally assume a redirect is an attempt to mislead, to cloak, etc.

You can always ask for them to consider your specific case though - they are getting better at that sort of thing, or so I hear.

[kullthevaluzian]

I've been using that redirerection for over a year and haven't been penalized yet. May it happen?

[new_shoes]

I know of one SEO company that consequently uses javascript redirects and to my knowledge none of their clients have been penalized.

It should be noted, that they actually js redirects as part of cloaking.

[Receptional Andy]

>> Javascript redirects are almost always penalised eventually

This isn't true. In the first place, search engines don't read javascript and so in most cases won't know the redirects are there. Cloaking is showing search engines one thing and visitors another. Nothing to do with redirecting people to the new location for a resource.

If you use a page with just a redirect and a simple message like "this page has moved to [newlocation.com"...] and a link to the new page you will not have any probloems. Think of the amount of times you have seen similar pages yourself.

That said:
>>The content of new site is almost exactly the same as the old one

You could be punished for this. What you should do is set up a 302 redirect from your old site to the new one. This way you keep PR from existing links etc and do not run any risks with the search engines. This is also the method approved by Google and others.

(Welcome to webmasterworld by the way everyone! ;))

[new_shoes]

> This isn't true. In the first place, search engines don't
> read javascript and so in most cases won't know the
> redirects are there.

One way of making sure this is so, is to move you javascript into a seperate file which is included by the html file, but excluded with robots.txt.

[Receptional Andy]

Why exclude it? There is nothing underhand going on here. Hiding the js file with robots seems to me to invite suspicion

[James_Dale]

Not sure what you mean by 'different directory' to be honest. Are you referring to domains hosted on a virtual server?

Put it this way then : if I noticed a site with a top ranking for a popular keyword, and it was using a javascript redirect, I would have suspicions - and I'm not the only one.

Using a redirect in this way leaves you open to unecessary suspicion. Depending on the competitiveness of your keyphrase, someone might end up sending a spam report to Google complaining about your methods.

Google will then make up their own minds whether or not you are violating any of their rules. So, to summarise, using a javascript redirect has an element of risk attached to it.

[webmasterworld.com...]
[ihelpyouservices.com...] etc...

[Receptional Andy]

>> if I noticed a site with a top ranking for a popular keyword, and it was using a javascript redirect

By their nature, simple javascript redirects like the one I described above are highly unlikely to rank well for keyphrases, unless the page has changed into the redirect since the search engine took it's cache.
If a redirect does top the results, and it is the redirect page in the cache, other factors must have produced the ranking.