On my forums (before) I wrote a hack that automatically forwarded all the google bots to my archive. I was wondering, is this against the TOS or something? I read on Google that treating the Googlebot as anything other then a normal guest isn't advisable, but is it totally against the rules?

(And I know redirections aren't a good idea. This wasn't really a 'redirection', it just made my forumhome act like the archive, no real 'redirection' involved.)

Naughty naughty Chroder ! ;-)

Per the guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Quality Guidelines - Basic principles:

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.

I would just run a link off of your footer so it can be found, just like a sitemap.

Google often penalises redirect pages.

I would take Ronnies advice if I were you. If Google doesn't already realise that you are doing it, it will and then it will ban you.

Originally Posted by RonnieTheDodger

Naughty naughty Chroder ! ;-)

Per the guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html



I would just run a link off of your footer so it can be found, just like a sitemap.

That's exactly what I did, I heard Google doesn't like being redirected very much.

I do have redirect pages though. But I usually keep them in one directory labeled /redirect/ and put a disallow all in my robots.txt file. Sometimes there is a legit usage for it, but to be safe (and more organized) I will use this method to accomplish it.

The reason is for my affilliate links. Rather than have the oft times long winded affilliate link on my pages, I use a shorter internal link to a redirect page instead. The redirect has my aff ID in it all ready to go. But like I said, that directory is off limits for indexing.

I am unsure as to how bad this redirect thing is.

I have a site where the front page redirects you to another page on the site. Mainly it is old bad coding but the redirect is from the url to some url in the cgi-bin directory.

Anyway all the site is indexed by google and have been for a while.

Peter

Sometimes a little more info would be good to take a look at the problem. But if you are referring to your Wrestling site, then everything looks okay ... Google is indexing the site pretty good and is showing over 270 pages.

The redirect you are referring to is on a sub-domain and not the main domain. Not that that matters. The kind of re-directs that are not liked by Google are the type that will direct you to another site altogether. Yours is internal which is cool, and as long as the spider can follow it .. you will be okay (in this case, Google can and all others should not have a problem with it either. For instance, here is the page as cached at Yahoo.

The kind of re-directs that are not liked by Google are the type that will direct you to another site altogether.

What if it's another site but the content's the same?
Well not exactly the same...

I'm thinking of a site I started out on Geocities and eventually bought some space for. I started using a real host when I ran out of space on geocities (and was getting tired of the ads). I had the domain name point to the new host, which is great, but google at that point was listing so many individual pages on the geocities site I hated to take it down. So I just put a redirect on the home page to the home page on the paid host, figuring that people will likely go to the home page before too long. The new site is about 5 times the size of the old now.

If this is an unacceptable way to do things, what would be a better approach?

AmyD