301 Redirect with the help of html?

[geekay]

A non-commercial information site of mine has for many years been hosted for free by Yahoo and has a nice search engine rank. Now the site has grown big enough to have its own domain. But how can I close down the Yahoo address in a proper manner when htaccess or cgi are not allowed? Is there any way to achieve a search engine approved 301 Redirect in html or something else? With a Meta Refresh I will keep my users but probably lose the Google PR. Is a static page with an ordinary link to click better? Or maybe it is best to simply evoke a 404 error! At present Google indexes pages from both the old and the new site.

[tedster]

Welcome to the forum, geekay.

A 301 is a server side action, and you cannot create it within the HTML itself.

That said, you certainly have a bigger issue here, trying to come up with the best approach to moving your site to a dedicated domain when you can't create the ideal situation of a 301 redirect. That's well beyond the scope of the Browsers and HTML forum, but it would probably include getting the inbound links to your free pages changed to your new domain, at least to the degree that you can.

You might also consider using your old, free space to show a site map for your new domain. But there's not going to be any easy way to immediately transfer the total pop of your old, free pages to a new dedicated domain. It will be a process you need to nurse along.

I once handled a situation like this with slow meta-refresh pages on the old site, plus requests to change links to the biggest inbounds. That's not necessarily the ideal, but it didn't take too long (4-5 weeks) until the new domain was rolling along on its own steam and we never looked back.