Forum Moderators: phranque
I got to thinking about doing a 301 redirect for the page on my higher-ranking site to the page on my money site. But I don't want visitors to the higher-ranking site to be redirected to the money site; I just want to redirect the SE bots.
My questions are: can this be done? Will the page on the money site take the #3 spot currently occupied by the page on the older site and, if so, what happens to the rank of the page on the older site? Further, is this ethical?
Any replies are much appreciated.
I have a question and I'm asking it earnestly, because I've always wondered when I see this kind of situation: Why do you want to compete with yourself, splitting your PageRank, link-popularity, and your own efforts across two sites, #3 and #7, when you might get #2 if you only linked to one and only promoted one? If you don't wish to answer, I'll understand, but it is something to think about yourself, anyway.
If you decide to go forward, consider investing in a professional "cloaking support" service, so that you can be sure to catch *all* of the IP addresses used by the search engines to check sites for cloaking. Without a service to keep up with the ever-changing IP address map, it becomes a full-time job to watch your server logs and check up on IP addresses that just might be visiting to check to see if you serve materially different content (or a redirect) if the user-agent is not an SE robot. And if just one gets in before you can catch it... :(
Jim
The #3 site is for a brick-and-mortar store that really doesn't benefit much from the website. The #7 site is my online store.
When I initially thought about it, I thought the #7 page would perhaps move to the #3 spot, and the page on the brick and mortar store site would just fall from the search results.
I'm not well versed enough in redirects to know what's dangerous and what isn't, which is why I posed the question. Thanks for alerting me to the risks.
What's frustrating about the rankings is that the #3 page hasn't been touched in several years, and has held that #3 spot almost without fail, right behind two links to the manufacturer's site. The other site that's ranking #7 has far more traffic, more backlinks, and higher PR, but it's been bounced around by Google for the past few months.
So much for fresh content, more backlinks and all the other stuff we're supposed to do. I can't even beat a page I created using the same SEO techniques!
