301 redirect!

[mossop]

I have redirected my old site to my new site using the 301 redirect.

Will the search engine eventually pick up the new domain so when the searcher finds my site listed it will have the new domain as the first intial link instead of going through the old one?

Will google punish me for using the 301 redirect thinking that I am trying to create links to my new site?

[Mel]

Yes with the exception of Yahoo, who seem to have some problems handling 301s at the moment.

[mossop]

Yes to my first question or second?

[cyanide]

Originally Posted by mossop

Yes to my first question or second?

Yes to the first question and no to the second
The 301 tells the bots that the page has moved permanently

[baritoneuk]

S'cuse my ignorance- but how do you put a 301 header on the site?

[pedstersplanet]

Put this in a .htaccess file:

redirect 301[list=1] <new domain>

if youre using Apache...
Just a / (forward slash) in[list=1] will work IIR.

Thats how I have my .com redirected....

[greeneagle]

mossop,
Was in the page header or a server side permanent 301 redirect?

Does anyone know what is preferred?

I also just saw another code snippet in another thread that claimed that it needed to be done that way in the header or it would be percieved as a 302 temporary redirect posted by T2DMan:
"You need to be very careful with how you do redirects

The correct coding for a 301 redirect is:

$url="http://domain.com";
Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
Header ( "Location: $url" );

Without the first header, the redirect becomes a 302 temporary redirect. If you use wording even slightly different, it can also become a 302 redirect."

This one is far from being resolved, can anyone shed more light?

Ken

[emils]

Originally Posted by greeneagle

mossop,
Was in the page header or a server side permanent 301 redirect?

Does anyone know what is preferred?

I also just saw another code snippet in another thread that claimed that it needed to be done that way in the header or it would be percieved as a 302 temporary redirect posted by T2DMan:
"You need to be very careful with how you do redirects

The correct coding for a 301 redirect is:

$url="http://domain.com";
Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
Header ( "Location: $url" );

Without the first header, the redirect becomes a 302 temporary redirect. If you use wording even slightly different, it can also become a 302 redirect."

This one is far from being resolved, can anyone shed more light?

Ken

I have recently used this particular php code snippet to redirect thousands of pages on some of my sites, due to modifying site structure. It worked just fine. 2-3 days after the change, Google came and mass loaded the new pages and all went fine afterwards.

If you are unsure if your 301 works fine, check it with a header viewer page. Like this one: http://www.delorie.com/web/headers.html .

As a note, in my case the header shows: "HTTP/1.1 301 Undescribed" instead of "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently". However this is still a 301 and Google picked it up ok. I don't really know why it does that, used the code above Ken provided (server has IIS+PHP). But even with this issue, it worked for me.

Good luck!

[robinev]

As I understand it (and it's unclear as are so many things Unix-related where writers insist on being mysterious when explaining anything), to do a 301 redirect in an .htaccess file you should use either the keyword "permanent" or the keyword "301":

redirect permanent /oldpage.html http://my.site.com/newpage.html

Without the keyword, the entry would become a 302 temporary redirect.

I haven't noticed that it makes much difference to Google. It seems to handle both 301's and 302's in the same manner. The buggy Yahoo, of course, doesn't handle them at all.

[mossop]

Is this right then

My old website is www.old-domain.co.uk
My new website is www.new-domain.co.uk

$url="http://www.new-domain.co.uk";
header("HTTP/1.1 301 moved permanently");
header("location: $url"

I am not sure if I have done it right can anyone help?

[braknews]

In my experience, using the .htaccess, I found that it was better to have the following:

redirect 301 http://old-domain.com/ http://new-domain.com/

The slashes at the end of the domain names ensures that if there is a link to a specific page on your old site the visitor will be redirected to a page of the same name in the new.