WEB FORWARDING PAGE affect on SEO?

[mctwofist]

Morning,

I'm building a site for a friend of mine. Unfortunately he's running a web forwarding page out of his host and into his free Telus account. My question is what effect will this have on any SEO tactics I employ? Will the search engines only pickup on the initial jump page or will the spiders take the time to visit the free index page?

Would be nice if he just picked up the entire hosting package instead of having to do this the good old fashioned mickey mouse way but what can you do.

Any advice or suggestions would be most welcome.

cheers
angus.

[tertius]

Angus, here are few questions for you:

Is there content visible on the redirect or is he running a 'hidden' redirect page not seen by visitors?
(Search engine spiders are known to ignore pages where there is no content visible in the body section. Also, without content a page's position rank for any given keywords will be rather difficult to compute....)

Is the Telus free account sharing an IP address with other domains?
(If so, that can adversely affect his rankings, especially if another site on the shared IP gets on a search engine's 'black list' or banned outright--that action will affect all sites on the shared IP address. In addition, some search engines treat sites hosted at "free hosting" sites differently than the rest....)

What kind of redirect (HTTP 301 server redirect, meta-refresh, scripting redirect, HTTP 302 htaccess/asp/server redirect, etc.) is being used?
(All of these methods can cause problems with search engines, but the type of redirect will affect how spiders handle the redirect and thus how minor or severe the problems may be.)

What type of site (personal, artistic, non-profit, professional or business) are you building?
(If it's a professional or business site, the business needs to present itself accordingly--business sites hosted on "free" hosting services come across as not being serious about their business presence or reputation or give the impression of being a "fly-by-night". To avoid this kind of a first impression they need to buy a domain name and have it professionally hosted.)

These are just some questions and comments that popped to mind when reading your post...

FWIW!
-Tertius