The Re-direction Problem

With the search engines clamping-down on 302-type redirects (temporary redirects) as these are used in the unsavoury practice of web page hijacking (where a php or other script is used to driect search 'bots to the originating page but all other requests are directed to another page). As a result the originating page is indexed but almost all seearches are directed somewhere else.

The search engines have taken action against these underhanded tactics by effectively banning all 302 redirection requests. This has led many webmasters to fall foul of the new wat that the search engines look at the world and have either suffered dramatic drops in the number of pages indexed or have been banned entirely from Google. Salutory lesson number 1 is this: if you have more than one domain name pointing at your website then plaese, plase make certain that they are all re-directed to your main site using 301 (permanent) redirects.

So why, you might ask, am I prattling-on about 301 and 302 redirects... Well, I'm trying to gather as many domain names with 'celtnet' in them as possible and I've just bought 'www.celtnet.net' via my ISP. I was trying to sort-out a redirect from this to my main site www.celtnet.org.uk. Of course, after securing the domain I need to link it to my old domain so that the 'www.celtnet.net' domain name points at my existing pages. However, on searching my ISPs information pages they seem only to offer either 302 redirects or the inclusion of the old domain's pages within a window in the new domain.

The second solution really doesn't help me and the first solution could get me banned from Google! Not very helpful at all! I've just contacted my ISP to see what this is all about but for the moment I have a new domain name that I can't connect to my existing website because it's the wrong type of redirect.

The moral of this story, if you're buying alternate domain names from your ISP or your hosting provider make sure that they offer you the correct kind of redirect otherwise you may end-up with a domain name that you can't connect to anything.