404 redirect

SEO friendly?

[jdancing]

I would like transparently redirect a bunch of pages on a website from one folder to another folder without changing the URL for browsers and SE spiders. The site in question is on a shared hosting Windows plan that won't allow us to do the proper backend IIS redirect.

The workaround that we have come up with is involves changing the default 404 error. Basically what is done is 404 error is changed from the default and set to a URL which calls a script that tells the browser to look for the page in the new folder. If the page has moved and is in the folder it instantly pulls up the page in the new location (the URL stays the same) and if the page really isn't there a 404 error comes up as normal.

It seems to be working - to spiders and browsers (it seems) that the page is still in the old location and the Pagerank remains the same.

I should mention that the moved page never causes 404 error, and when I examine the HTTP header of a moved page I get: HTTP/1.1 200 OK =>

This solution seems to work, but I just have a bad feeling about doing a redirect with 404. Am I playing with fire? Or is this redirect, while a bit clumsy, still SEO friendly?

[Ocean10000]

I never had a problem doing this, as long as you make sure when it doesn't match any of your predefined redirects it does return a proper 404 error. What you are doing is doing what I call the poor man's modrewrite, with the only availible options you have.

[jdancing]

Hmmm... 'Poor Man's ModRewrite' I like it :)

What surprised me is when we did it and moved the pages they all kept their pagerank even though they were in a new directory. When doing a standart 301 redirect with Apache it usually takes some time for the pagerank to follow.

[Ocean10000]

If I understood how you setup your 404 error catcher/redirect script it more then likely uses server.transfer(url) which wouldn't give off any signs that the page has moved at all. So the effect would be you would not lose any pr since the search engines still think the pages are in the same place.

[jdancing]

If I understood how you setup your 404 error catcher/redirect script it more then likely uses server.transfer(url) which wouldn't give off any signs that the page has moved at all. So the effect would be you would not lose any pr since the search engines still think the pages are in the same place.

No, it gets requested page directly. Yet the page still mantains PR?

[jdancing]

With the risk of acting like Rainman here...

Server.Transfer use server-side redirection in order to show another page. But this method is available for asp/asp.net pages only (this site has HTML pages only).

Our redirect script works in the following way:
it requests the page via new the new url directly (with /newdirectory/page.htm), while returning the old page location to user/spider.

So far it seems the effect is the same as using Server.Transfer.

It seems I am in uncharted waters here which makes me a bit nervous. But as far as I can tell, the pages we moved all seem to be in their old directory while they are actually in a different directory within the same domain.

[Ocean10000]

You are correct your main pages are STATIC html pages. But the redirect (404) page is not, and thus has access to the server.transfer method to make the magic happen.

[HighConversions]

This is how my company does all of its project. For pages which have moved we write in a Redirect Header and for error pages we write in a 404 header error. You can use Google SiteMap to verify these.