4 replies to this topic

[finnstones]

i want to add a redirect to my url www.mysite.com/sitemap.cfm

people will type that in but will be brought to www.mysite.com/links/sitemap.cfm

this will be the same exact page except more up to date

the reason i want to do this is because i am enabling someone access to my sitemap.cfm page and i dont want them to have any access to other files, this was the best solution

will i be penalized, it will probavbyl be like this for 3 months while the project is on and hile they need acces sto the file

[Randy]

Simply set up a 301 from the old /sitemap.cfm page to the new /links/sitemap.cfm page. Exclude the old one with your robots.txt file and remove it from the server.

That should do the trick and cover all of the bases !

[scolling]

yeah, 301 redirect is your answer

(or you could use a URL rewriting option to rewite the URL server-side)

[bkernst]

I have had some issues with a 301 redirect where the old links were never removed. I have waited now nearly two months and the links are still shown.
What I have done a few days ago, was to put up a custom 404 error page with the robots meta tag to not archive or index, and to follow the link to the proper URL.
The site was originally different, but the old links from after changing the interface happily stayed there. When the old links were used, the home page was displayed. The home page ended up being listed about 80 times because of that. Hopefully the 404 technique will get rid of the leftovers.

Bernhard

[kevinsource]

I used the 301 redirect and saw some problems. I will first start by explaining the situation.

We have many sites that are all interlinked. All of these sites are related to each other (selling kitchen items) Back in the 1990's is was ok to have multiple domains (all interlinked), but as we all know it is becoming more difficult for many different reasons.

We decided that we would redirect all of our subdomains into our main domain to create a powerhouse and avoid any possible penalties for duplicate content etc. Also, making management & link building much easier.

I decided to test the 301 procedure before using it across the board on nearly 18,000 product pages. What did I do? I placed a 301 redirect on the server for the welcome page of one of our subdomains (redirecting it to a directory in our main domain.)

Exclude the old one with your robots.txt file and remove it from the server.

I did not use the robot.txt file for the old page, nor did I remove it from the server.

What did I see? Our Google page 1 listing went to the bottom of page two (new page indexed) Our Yahoo! listing remained nearly the same, but the new page is not indexed (still the old page)

The drop in Google serp's makes me nervous to move thousands of pages using this method. The fact that Yahoo! has not picked up the new page is just as concerning (when Yahoo! finally realizes the old page is no longer used, will we loose the listing all together?)

Anyone have any thoughts? If anyone has time, you can use the link in my signature to see our domains and the issues I am having. While browsing our site(s) you can see that you are moving from domain to domain. This huge mess needs to be tidied up!

Thanks in advance for the input!
Kev