Forum Moderators: coopster
Of course JavaScript refreshes and meta refreshes where out of the question because they are not SEO friendly. The simple header 301 status & header redirect option was out because it redirects before any message can be shown. So I was in luck when I discovered the handy php header refresh function. After this discovery, it took only a minute to code this:
//set header
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
//perform url refresh in 3 seconds
header( 'refresh: 3; url=http://www.example.com' );
//print temp message here
echo '<html>.........';
It seemed to be a simple solution, and worked perfectly in firefox; catching all 404 errors, giving the right 301 header, displaying the custom message and redirecting.
To my dismay, I found that this solution doesnt work for IE. In fact, its seems IE doesnt work if you attempt to display output after this header status code.
I could probably code a clunky workaround for this task, but I'd rather have the elegant solution that I got with this code in Firefox. Is this a known bug? Did I overlook something? Is there any even simpler solution?
Please help
Thanks!
header("Location: http://www.example.com/");
this will not work?
on php.net they do mention that there is some IE bug with header function and someone gave a solution.
In this situation, my first thought would be to use some form of cloaking (even if it is just simple user agent detection for Googlebot, Slurp and MSNBot) to issue a standard 301 redirect to the bots and a meta refresh with expanation to everyone else. Either that, or convince your client that the silent 301 is the better solution for all.
//404 file
header('HTTP/1.1 301');
header("Location: http://example.com/refresh.php);
then
//refresh.php
header( "refresh: 3; url=http://example2.com" );
echo '<html> ....';
this works fine, but is this Search Engine friendly? would I get the pageRank to propagate through to e.g. example2.com.
Thanks
