301 redirect when promoting directory to new domain

holmpage · #1 (**permalink**) 12-18-2006, 11:14 PM

I have had a couple of clients with well-established websites who were branching out in a new direction with a partly overlapping target market. The new product line was begging for its own site, and what was a directory under one domain became a new site under a new domain. Wishing to avoid duplication, we moved all the material to a new domain and linked to it from the menu on the old site, and also made text links in the content here and there. We did not use meta refresh on the old pages (we know better); just put a notice and a link to the new page for users who had bookmarked them, and made them "lame ducks" by having all menu links point to the new site. In both cases, the new sites have new domain names and have been sandboxed, even though in once case the material had been very popular when on the original site.

I've read a lot about 301 redirects and maintaining page rank when moving a site from one domain to another.

Is a 301 redirect effective for transfering PR and traffic from a directory on one domain to a new domain? Would it be better, Google-wise, to have created a subdomain for the newer section and keep the two sites under the same domain?

Does anyone know if a permanent redirect means that Google will never return to those pages again? What if you use the domain or the directory five years later after the new site is completely established?

Related technical question: In both cases, the original sites were on shared Windows hosting (so .htaccess could not be used to create a 301 redirect) and we did not have access to IIS.

I've studied Steven Hargrove's much cited post at http://www.stevenhargrove.com/redirect-web-pages/, but am confused about how to implement the suggested ASP redirect on an HTML page:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

Here are my dumb (as a non-programmer) questions: Do you put it in the head or the body? Do you eliminate the rest of the code and content? Wrap it in <html> tags or leave it as naked ASP - the pages I want to redirect are all plain old html pages. I've tried various permutations and combinations, and haven't been able to make it work.

Or is there another way?

(I'll be choosing Linux/Unix hosting from now on whenever I get the choice!)

Thanks in advance,
Heather

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