The Other Search Engines

**Dark-Skys99** · 05-26-2004, 04:49 PM

Im using a php script on my site so that a link to another page e.g http://something.dark-skys.com is set in the script so that when http://go.dark-skys.com?id=xxx is entered it will redirect the user to the page http://something.dark-skys.com

The question is will google still be able to find and index the pages???

Incase ive confused you as im kinda bad at describing things the code im using is...
<?php

$urls[home] = 'http://dark-skys.com';
$urls[awards] = 'http://awards.dark-skys.com';
$urls[chat] = 'http://ozone.dark-skys.com';
$urls[games] = 'http://games.dark-skys.com';

if(!isset($_GET['id']))
die('<head>
<title>Redirecting...</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.dark-skys.com">
</head>');

$id = $_GET['id'];
if(!isset($urls[$id]))
header('Location: http://error.dark-skys.com/404.htm');
else
header('Location: ' . $urls[$id]);

?>

Thanks

James

**mxlabs** · 05-28-2004, 05:50 PM

in general google doesnt like meta refresh... if you use it googlebot wont be able pass the referrer info (backlink URL & PR) so it probably wont even index the pages behind that script.

if you want to use a dynamic solution and not lose the search engine robots at the same time you should have a look at mod rewrite:
http://www.weberblog.com/article.php/20040502142254284
this is a basic example but I'm sure that you can find thousand of tutorials on the web

**Dark-Skys99** · 05-28-2004, 06:11 PM

Thanks,

I've decided to leave the script now and use the Dynamic one when i finally get my MySQL working

Thanks

James