SEO Tycoon

**walkingbird** · 12-06-2008, 12:55 AM

How exactly do Redirects work.

Say i put a link in my signatures to a page that randomly redirects to different pages on my site.

Would i get a few links for every page or would it olny be a link to the page with the redirect and no of the other pages would get any benefit.

**chrishirst** · 12-06-2008, 04:41 AM

It depends on how the redirect was done. If you were merely concerned with the SE aspect.
A 302 would work as a link to the page with the redirect.
A 301 would give pretty much nothing, as the link changes constantly. BUT from a crawling POV it could get deeper pages into the index.

From the more important aspect of getting pages in front of people, it could be a interesting experiment and a different take on A/B split testing.

**walkingbird** · 12-06-2008, 02:47 PM

Would the search engines consider this black hat? Yeas i think it would be great way to get pages in front of people and analysis the metrics.

So a 302 would work as a link to the page it is redirecting to?

**chrishirst** · 12-06-2008, 03:40 PM

Quote:

Would the search engines consider this black hat?

Nope. Google even offer a means of them doing it for you as part of the Adwords Website Optimiser.
A/B testing is a standard means of testing conversions for pages, so it's not unusual for SEs to come across a page that redirects to a different page each time it is accessed.
As an aside; A/B testing and the code to use is the next planned "article" for modTalk/C and S Design when I actually finish it

No. A 302 redirect would keep the link "value" on the page with the redirect.
A 301 redirect will transfer the "value" over. However, because the final landing page is a moving target and link value to any page is continually analysed with every iteration of the indexing system, the passed value would be none or very low.
Also the link originating page is from a low value moving target as well, as links to any one page on a forum come and go at a fairly high frequency.
All in all to make forum sig links a "useful" commodity for SE value you need hundreds of thousands of them.

**walkingbird** · 12-09-2008, 01:01 AM

Thanks Chris - i guess its back to the drawing board to think of a new idea.

**jmontes** · 12-10-2008, 08:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Nope. Google even offer a means of them doing it for you as part of the Adwords Website Optimiser.
A/B testing is a standard means of testing conversions for pages, so it's not unusual for SEs to come across a page that redirects to a different page each time it is accessed.
As an aside; A/B testing and the code to use is the next planned "article" for modTalk/C and S Design when I actually finish it

No. A 302 redirect would keep the link "value" on the page with the redirect.
A 301 redirect will transfer the "value" over. However, because the final landing page is a moving target and link value to any page is continually analysed with every iteration of the indexing system, the passed value would be none or very low.
Also the link originating page is from a low value moving target as well, as links to any one page on a forum come and go at a fairly high frequency.
All in all to make forum sig links a "useful" commodity for SE value you need hundreds of thousands of them.

Thanks... I didn't know that

. I use these all over my sites. This is how Joomla! SEF extensions works!