External link setup when redirecting within a site

[Solideo]

I'm currently working on setting up external links for an ecommerce site, and I'm trying to decide between 2 different methods of going about this. The trick is that the main page for the site is shop.mysite.com/scripts, and www.mysite.com redirects to this page. (Because of the way the cart software is designed, it works well to do it this way from a site setup standpoint.)

So the question becomes, when setting up external links, is it better to use the url of the actual main page (shop.mysite.com/scripts), or is it OK to use www.mysite.com? I prefer the latter because it's cleaner & easier to remember, but I'm not sure what kind of effect it will have.

Hope this all makes sense… any input would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[jestep]

As long as you are doing a 301 redirect to the new page, you can link into the root page and you should be fine. Its not ever a guarantee, but it should work out.

[Solideo]

Please excuse my ignorance on this one... How can I tell whether I'm using a 301 redirect? Currently I'm using ASP's response.redirect method. Does this qualify?

Thanks

[gworld]

Originally Posted by Solideo

Please excuse my ignorance on this one... How can I tell whether I'm using a 301 redirect? Currently I'm using ASP's response.redirect method. Does this qualify?

Thanks

Here is the link to how to do 301 redirect both on the server or through scripts. I hope it helps.

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

[johngroup]

The asp response.redirect should work the same way.

[Solideo]

Thanks for everyone's input. I went ahead & modified the ASP redirect just in case. There's another link here describing a little more clearly how to accomplish the 301 redirect in ASP.

[Jerry]

Solideo,

Looks like you may be using the same ecommerce software we're using. Let me know if I can help with anything, and thanks for the link on the 301 redirect!

[Jerry]

Just a thought, have you tried looking over the forums at candypress.com for mods and add-ons?

[Solideo]

Originally Posted by Jerry

Just a thought, have you tried looking over the forums at candypress.com for mods and add-ons?

You're correct, we are using Candypress. I've been fairly happy with it, especially for the price. I check out their forum from time to time, & I've used a couple mods. We had a custom mod written early on that allowed us to assign customer-specific discounts at the category level, & I more recently purchased this product & category meta tag mod.

Have you found any other CP mods to be particularly useful?

[ditto]

Link to the domain, not the script root. It may be that further down the line you want to switch your script or reorganize the structure of the site and so change the url.

Sure you can use a redirect. But wouldn't it be better to build the PR and links around the domain name to begin with. This gives value to your domain name by itself.

hth,

[Solideo]

Thanks ditto. I think I'm going to move forward with linking to the domain rather than the actual main page.

If I follow what you're saying, that may bring up an interesting question - when one page redirects to another, do search engines see those pages as one & the same for ranking purposes? Or will I cause the relevancy to be split up between the 2 pages by linking to the one & having all the content on the other?

Obviously this would be simpler if I could just make the main page of the site the domain root, but it's just not practical right now because of the shopping cart I'm using. I have noticed that a number of other ecommerce sites do the same thing, but can't tell for sure how this affects them.

[toyourhealth]

I agree it is better to link to the domain for consistency of search engines ranking. I would not risk losing ranking because of it. If I remember correctly, some search engines don't like redirects. Can someone please comment on redirects and search engine relavancy.

[darkwater]

toyourhealth answered everything you needed to know. Almost all search engines wont catogorize your page if it is a redirect, so if your wanting to have the paged indexed in search engines you better change those links. Good Luck and don't have to much fun.

[Solideo]

Would it work simply to make the domain root page look the same as (or very similar to) the page to which it currently redirects? This would remove the redirect & avoid the need to change the entire directory structure of the site. But could this potentially be seen as a doorway page, or get me penalized for duplicate content?

[Solideo]

As long as the issues I mentioned in my last post don't become a problem, I think I've solved the redirect issue without having to build anything new. Just referenced the redirectee in the redirector as an include file. Had to change a few relative references to absolute in the inculded file, but that was about it.

Now I just happen to have 2 identical pages on the site. Neither redirects to the other, & they're obviously part of the same domain, so I'm hoping this doesn't cause any problems. Am I missing anything?

Thanks for all your input.

[Conficio]

Hey guys,
I think you are absolutely focusing on the wrong thing.

1. Why perpetuate a bad URL schema? Use URLRewriting (hopefully this exists on IIS - don't know) to get rid of the shop.mysite.com/scripts clutter
2. Why would you want any external links to your home page? If you sell a wide variety of products, create theme pages and entry pages for specific products and product groups and assign good (=keyword rich) link texts to each. That will get you the maximum value for your external links. Especially if you combine it with 1) of the correct URL rewriting, so the target URLs contain matching keywords from the link text.

The discussed technical solutions appear to be correct but they are not worth your effort. You can do much better.

K<o>

[Jerry]

Solideo,

I'd love to see the solution you used to get the root page included in the domain root.

If possible, could you pm me the code or send it through email to jerryrus<at>gmail.com?