redirect to home page

will search engines kill me?

[pelachrum]

I've heard rumors that some search engines will frown upon a webpage that redirects to another within a very short time (like right upon entrance)

what I'm considering is having every page of a small website to redirect to home page if source url is other than one of the pages belonging to that website.

what's a good solution here?

[irishaff]

It would depend on how you do it , but i can imagine there is room for pitfall , as you would be doing one thing with humans and another with spiders.

Your objective i guess is to have everybody go the start of your site? You will do it be referrer to the deep pages?

David

[tedster]

The best solution is a good information architecture and menu system -- one that allows any page to be a comfortable entry page. Otherwise, you may send traffic from search engines to a page that may not clearly be on-topic for their search.

There are definite pitfalls. As noted, search engines frown on a fast redirect of any kind, and the site could be dropped from search results altogether. Counting on a referer to be there is also a problem -- see [webmasterworld.com...] for a discussion. Such redirect schemes also defeat bookmarked access to internal pages and the potentially positive viral effects of links in email and on other web pages.