It could actually hurt your site. Only 301 or similar redirect will keep your site safe and help with the PR.
Then make a custom 404 page and put links to the pages you want to pass pagerank to. Don't do a refresh since you can't trust the search engines to be okay with it even if it is a 404 page.
Is the 301 redirect EXACTLY the same as a direct link, in terms of text anchors and PR ? I mean, if I have links to a page, with my favourite keywords in the anchor, and instead of using the URL in the HREF, I use a different URL to track clicks, but redirecting with 301, will I lose anything ?
Hi all, yahoo and msn crawls meta tag so we can place keyword in meta tag for more resourceful for page of website.
301 redirects are done by the server and people won't have time to click your link. If you use anything other than a live link in the page the search engines probably won't pick them up so it's best to use tracking code on your site instead of on the links if you're concerned about page rank.