Meta refresh redirects to a new home for the old dog...

Yeah - a whole week. 600 odd pages - but it in technical terms, it worked and it worked really well. I think I should go into a bit of detail since I had to spend a long time reading through conflicting reports on the effectiveness of this tactic and was very apprehensive about trying it.

Basically, the reports/articles said two things: 1) Yes, this is a good way to redirect pages.... and 2) No, under no circumstances try this!

And then I looked at the dates of the articles. The ones from 1999 to about 2005/6 said don't do it, the reason being that search engines will treat it as sneaky spamming and won't index any of your pages. In articles from later dates we read that this used to be the case, but recently search engine policies have changed. Since the price of quality web hosting has now become much more affordable, many web publishers have chosen to move their sites from free web hosting providers to paid host providers; however, this has caused problems with redirecting in the previously recommended manner which involved setting up .htaccess files. Most free web hosting services don't provide a service which allows this (in fact this service wasn't even available to me with my topcities account, even though I was paying a small fee).

So all these wee independent publishers, like me, were stuck with two nasty options - 1) do meta redirects and get flung off the search engine indices and 2) close down your old site and lose all the links to it. But then the engines, Google and Yahoo at least, apparently responded to popular demand/necessity and began to see this as a legitimate and acceptable way of redirecting in some circumstances. These circumstances seem to be when you make it clear that it is a simple redirect and not a trick. There are two main things to do to ensure this:

1) set the delay on the redirect to "0"

2) Remove all key words, descriptions and other unneccesary content from your page so that it is 'invisible' in terms of achieving ranking. That includes the title - make it something like 'Page moved to XXX -  I'll put an example up from my site later... I'm writing from another computer and I don't have access to the files at the moment. You might think I could open my old site and copy the source code BUT the redirect works SO well that it almost instantaneously changes to the new domain.

3) Include a 'robots' tag that instructs spiders to follow links but not to index pages.

So, does the system work? Damn right it does! I uploaded all my files onto the new server then immediately uploaded all the redirect pages over the existing ones on my old server. The transition was seamless and two days later, when the tracking code on the new site had been picked up by Google analytics, I was getting more hits on my site than I used to. Google and Yahoo both very quickly started indexing my new pages, in some cases giving them more prominence than they used to have. I interpret this success as being because 1) a domain name is given more weight than a subdomain at a free hosting service and because 2) there is no penalty at all for doing what I've just done.

So there you have it.....if, indeed, you want it. Someone might. I would have appreciated this advice from someone else a week ago.

Next post will be about vegetarian cooking and travelling and stuff....promise.