In this article I will discuss page redirection techniques, what works and what to avoid.
Article Body:
Must read information about site redirection techniques, how it works and what factors to avoid.
What is page redirection and why you should use it in your site?
Let’s say you rewrite a webpage on your website, for making that webpage SEO friendly. As it make strong impression on theme of your webpage and its link popularity factors etc and you wish to insert keywords for improving visibility in the eyes of search engines and human readers.
Let’s take an example and elaborate the topic
Let’s say the page in question is about free SEO analysis of website and I named it page5.htm. Then when I read text in that page and I found out that Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc use words or phrases in the actual file name as search keywords. Next time when i do a Google search after modified my webpage making it SEO friendly, when I search query regarding SEO analysis of website in Google then I found that my website SEO Spidy is listing in top result. As modifying my webpage and its Meta description and I bold certain keyword in it benefits me as top listing in Google. If you practice same thing then it will benefit to your webpage too.
Questions come in your mind about between
You will have to point every link on your site to the new page name. If your site is small, then you can manage it easily but when your website is huge portal and have 1000 of pages and pages are produced dynamically then its major issue because more than 75 % make mistakes like making duplicate content pages, stable redirection not found, link rel tag not found, generating broken links etc. This will result in many factors like your site may stay long in Google sandbox for content penalty, visitors getting “404 page not found” error when clicking on your links, demotion in search engine for many keywords of your website etc.
Let’s use the previous example, for a long time my page is page5.html was indexed by major search engines. If a name types “Free seo analysis of website” in a search engine box, my page shows up on the second search results screen. But when I update it as Free-seo-analysis-of- website.html then it make strong impression as my website is listing top 3 result in first page of search result. This make a strong impression as search engine update my listing by cache it and remove obsolete page5.html
Lost Page Rank (PR) issues:
Google urban a proprietary algorithm that assigns a Page Rank (PR) to every page on the web. PR is a number from 1 to 10 (10 being the ultimate) and is intended to be a representation of how useful and standard a given page is. PR is influenced by many factors, one of the crucial ones being Link Popularity. Link Popularity is a representation of how many “feature” or “relevant” sites link to your page. Without getting into too much detail, it is increasingly hard and time consuming to achieve a high PR for your pages, especially if you don’t have a really unique website with exceptional and highly required after content. When you rename a page and discard the ancient page, you also discard the PR of the page. Your renamed page will be seen as a perfectly new page, with 0 PR.
What is the solution?
I will start by enumerating some of the methods used by the non-initiated.
Not recommended solution 1: Duplicate content.
First thing that probably comes in your mind is: well, why can’t I just duplicate the page and let nature take its course. In other words, I will have two identical pages, one named page5.html and Free-SEO-Analysis-of-website.html. This gives me time to update all links and the search engines will ultimately index the new page.
But unfortunately this solution is not viable because search engines will penalize my site reasonably terribly, ‘thinking’ right that I am are trying to scam them by using the ‘duplicate content’ practice.
Not recommended solution 2: Custom error message.
If i could make a custom error page. But, I will lose rankings on the next search engine update as the file will appear to be non-surviving. As discussed above, it could be some time previous to the page with the new name will be indexed and will appear in people’s searches. Also, your web site visitors will be frustrated by the fact that they now have to dig through your site to find the desired information.
Not recommended solution 3: An HTML Meta redirect.
You could implement a so called Meta refresh in a blank or customized page that has the name of the ancient page (in our example, page5.html) that points to the Free-seo-analysis-of-website.html webpage. The redirect can be instant, or delayed by a predetermine amount of time. The delayed redirect has the advantage that you can place an extra message, such as “please be aware that the page you are looking for changed place….. etc., etc…. you will be redirected involuntarily to the new place”
In the past, this was probably the most used practice.
Without getting into the mechanics of the Meta redirect, which is in the end a META tag statement you add to your HEADER section, know that there are also JavaScript techniques that achieve similar results.
What is terrible about this is that this is a practice evenly used by spammers to trick search engines and it should be avoided, unless the page is in a section of your site that isn’t indexed (also known as spidered or crawled). Search engine spammers make a page that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases – it usually has no real content. The page is then picked up by some search engines, but when a visitor clicks on the search engine entry, they are redirected to a further site, evenly unrelated. Most search engines have filters to notice this. Using this form of search engine deception will see a site ultimately banned or penalized by major search giant such as Google, Bing, Yahoo.
The recommended redirect strategy – 301 Redirect
A 301 redirect is the most well-organized, visitor friendly, robot (spider, crawler) friendly and search engine friendly solution around for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache. If you are not sure, check with your hosting provider.
A 301 redirect is just a set of commands you type into your .htaccess file.
When a visitor (whether human or robotic) requests a web page via any means, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.
The code “301″ is interpreted as “went permanently”. After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new place or file name.
First of all, you’ll need to find the .htaccess file in the root directory of where all your web pages are stored. If there is no .htaccess file there, you can make one with Notepad or a similar application. Make sure when you name the file that you remember to place the “.” at the beginning of the file name. This file has no tail extension.
Some hosting providers place forward redirect air force through their “control panels”, so you don’t have to perform low amount changes on the .htaccess file itself. Instead, they provide a user friendly interface for this. Check with your hosting provider to see what the optimal way to perform a 301 redirect is in your case. I will take up again the article with the barebones solution.
If there is a .htaccess file by now in existence with lines of code present, be very careful not to exchange any existing line unless you are familiar with the functions of the file.
Scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then make a new line that follows this example:
redirect 301 /folder/page5.html http://www.Seospidy.com/folder/Free-seo-analysis-of-website.html
It’s as simple as that. Save the file, upload it back into your web and test it out by typing in the ancient address to the page you’ve changed. You should be instantly and seamlessly transported to the new place.
Notes: Be sure not to add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – just place the path from the top amount of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:
redirect 301 (the education that the page has went)
/folder/page5.html (the original folder path and file name)
http://www.seospidy.com/folder/Free-seo-analysis-of-website.html (new path and file name)
The same format applies not only to renamed files, but also to files went to a different place.
The 301 redirect is the safest way to preserve your rankings. On the next indexing (crawling, spidering), the search engine robot will obey the rule indicated in your .htaccess file and index the new page name every time a link or its internal database tries to access the ancient page. In the next update (again, this could take months), the ancient file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating ancient/new file names during the transition period, along with some possible fluctuations in rankings as things descend. Don’t panic, this is habitual.
What if your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server instead?
If you have access to the server, do this: In internet air force manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect. Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”. Penetrate the redirection page, check “The exact url entered above” and the “A stable redirection for this resource”. Click “Apply”.
If you do not have access to the server, question your host to point you into the right management.
In close, the best and the most transparent way (to both human and robotic users) to rename and go files on your web site, while preserving your search engine ranks is the 301 redirect.
Posts Tagged ‘Redirecting’
Beginers guide to redirecting page using 301 redirect
Monday, December 28th, 2009Useless Traffic? Is there such a thing? GEO Redirecting your Foreign Traffic
Saturday, December 26th, 2009If you’ve read some of my other tutorials, you by now know that your .htaccess file can do a heck of a lot more than just keep a name from hot between your pictures. When you are hosted with some of the larger companies out there, it might be your only viable method of communicating with the server frankly.
Because that’s what .htaccess does. It is a file that gives exact commands to the server. Commands that tell the server how to respond in a certain situation or environment.
Now to keep this simple, we won’t go into the different modules that you can utilize in .htaccess like mod rewrite, or all the other mod’s out there. Because there are many. All mod stands for is ‘module’, an bonus piece of software to be used by the server.
Now if you are on a windows server, you can stop reading this now. .htaccess is only an option if you are on a Unix, Linux, Apache type server.
Down to today’s topic. Redirecting foreign traffic using htaccess.
Previous to I write a single detail though let me say this.
All traffic is valuable, just in different ways. Do NOT just copy and paste any of the code that follows, blindly into your htaccess file. Please research your options fully. Read several sources and find the best solution for you. Each server and it’s environment is different.
Be sure to question lots of questions previous to you start wildly count commands. It could result in a costly crash, or serious bandwidth overages that would also cost you a pretty penny. Do not simply take my word for it and copy my examples without knowing what the results can be.
In a nutshell, there are a few different ways to redirect traffic using your .htaccess file.
Originally the total concept was centered around BLOCKING a certain IP block rather than redirecting. The basic function for this was either to ALLOW or DENY a user that originates from a certain IP block. Very useful in having a secure area or folder. You can block ALL IP’s apart from your’s if you happen to have a static IP, or you could allow your general IP block that your ISP owns to have access. Still in effect cutting down your security risks substantially.
If you wanted to just block an IP, you would add a touch like this to your htaccess:
Code:
order deny,allow deny from 1.2.3.4 deny from 5.6.7.
In the above example, you are blocking two separate IP’s. 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.
As I said previous to, you could also use wildcards to block all users from those blocks. 1.*.*.* would not only block 1.2.3.4 , but it would block every user coming from the IP block early with the number 1. Millions of users in most cases.
So how can we use this process to redirect foreign traffic?
Instead of using a flat htaccess command like order, allow, or deny, we could use a rewrite rule or condition instead. This does require that you have mod rewrite for your server or it won’t work. To test it, use one of my earlier tutorials and do a simple ‘www’ or no ‘www’ url redirect and see if your server has the capability.
Now, I don’t want to go thru all the different ways you can redirect IP’s or domains or certain hosts in this tutorial. It is easily done and there are a jillion tutorials out there on this topic. So for the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on one particular method. But we do need to cover one thing. There is a huge difference between a flat rule and a conditional rule.
If your syntax is incorrect and you only place in the rule and not the condition, it will be a catch all, varying your site’s access to all users. Syntax for your rules and conditions are VERY vital.
One character in the incorrect place can mean the difference between a really fantastic new setup, or your entire site’s access blocked and 500 internal errors for all your users.
Once again, proceed with caution when altering these files.
So now we want to figure out how to push all that foreign traffic to a touch a small more useful or profitable. We could make a list of all the foreign / undesirable IP blocks and list them out, line by line. This is how it was done for a long time.
But reckon of the hundreds and possibly thousands of lines of directives you would have to include in your htaccess. A giant headache to say the least. Time consuming and leaves a excellent chance for error along the way.
But that issue has been solved by many different IP place modules, primarily Geo mods.
In this instance, we are going to look at the Geo IP module. All Geo IP mod contains is a simplified ‘country code’ system that streamlines your code using it’s database for allusion. What I mean by this is simple. Instead of listing possibly hundreds of different IP blocks for a given country, you will only use ONE country code.
For example, if you wanted to redirect users originating from Mexico, then you would use a touch like this:
Code:
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^MX$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://myredirection.url [R,L]
This would send them to ‘myredirection.url’ . So the first thing you want to do previous to you start count a single line to your htaccess, is to choose where you want to send these users.
There are many companies that will buy your unwanted traffic and pay for each user you send. But, unless you are running a million hit’s a day, they are probably not going to give you much for it. Pennies.
So it’s much wiser to find a excellent way to use the traffic yourself. One way is to find a excellent affiliate that caters to a specific demographic and place. So this is going to take a small research. You will not only want to find the affiliate, but if at all possible, you want to tie it into your sites general focus / topic, so that you have a better chance of converting that traffic into cash.
It may not permanently be possible, so just do what you should permanently be doing when considering a new program. Place yourself in your users shoes and try to imagine what they are looking for. What their wellbeing might be, etc.
You’re probably going to want to break down different types of foreign traffic into separate blocks, sending each block to different pages you have setup for that demographic. For example:
Code:
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^CN$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^HK$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^MO$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^CN$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^HK$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^MO$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^MY$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^SG$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^TW$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/chineseusers.html [R,L]
Using the country codes for primarily Chinese users and sending them all to a single page setup for a Chinese affiliate program. In this case, ‘mydomain.com/chineseusers.html ‘ .
You’ll want to follow this pattern right through, unless you’ve chose to go it all to one place, or have sold it all to a foreign traffic buyer. You can break it down as much as you want too, sending each country to it’s own page if you prefer.
If you need help in building a solid GEO redirect plot for your traffic, please feel free to contact me by using the contact form on my site: http://www.chuckcrawford.com/
I realize that this is a very brief overview, so once again, please do your homework previous to putting a lot of time into building separate pages, lining up affiliates, etc. Make sure that your host offers a Geo module in the first place, not all do.
If you have a Dedicated, VPS, UNIX / Linux / Apache server environment and have root access, you may be able to install one yourself. Make dual sure you know what you’re doing in this instance previous to you start installing modules at server amount. Not all server software plays well with others and a terrible mix can result in cataclysm. Do not contact me AFTER you’ve ruined your build. Call me BEFORE if you’re unsure. 
You are welcome to call my office and schedule a consultation, the number is (866) 75-chuck . My team can help you with not only Geo redirection, but all facets of development. We are YOUR development team. Just a phone call away. To summarize, .htaccess can do some seriously incredible things. It can exchange how files are used and accessed, redirect users, require user information, be used as a simple password program, rewrite url’s, confine access, and much, much more. Take the time to research it’s power and you’ll be very surprised at some of the tricks you can do.
Until next time,