How to handle a temporary announcement page

Need to display an important announcement page to every visitor once

[tame4tex]

I have a important notice page that I need to display to every visitor of my website. This announcement is regarding a business location change. I only want to display this announcement once.

My plan was to redirect all visitors to the temporary page and once they view the page use a cookie to prevent the redirect from occuring again.

My concern is how search engines will react to this redirect for every page on my website. Will it effect my rankings if I use a 302 redirect. It is anticipated that the announcement page will exist for about a month.

Any advice on how to best handle this situation would be appreciated.

[Duskrider]

You could go ahead and use the cookie, but instead of redirecting to a temporary page you could use a javascript popup in order to notify the user of the change. The upside is that you won't need to worry about search engines indexing your temporary announcement. The downside is the general annoyance of a javascript popup window to the users.

[tame4tex]

I would prefer to not use a pop up because of pop up blocking software causing the notice to not be seen.

Would this temporary redirect be detremental to my existing ranking?

[caveman]

You're going to tell the SE's to essentially retain the existing landing page URL's ... and associate them with the announcement page? In other words, X number of pages on your site all = the contents of announcement page. Hmmm. Prolly not. ;-)

Options:
- The pop ups already mentioned.
- An announcement box on every page of the site (my personal fav).

Other?

[vincevincevince]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld! [webmasterworld.com]

I'd consider doing it as an image, despite the accessibility problems. Have a large image within your header, that way if someone accidentally sees it twice, or a bot indexes it - all they see is an image - they won't index the text.