Hi guys, I will try to explain my problem in the simplest possible way. What i am attempting to do is redirect an already re-directed page. Recently i launched a new website redirecting all old urls to new pages via 301's. Google webmaster tools revealed we were having many problems with duplicate content and pages not passing pagerank. I was using cms made simple. I decided to recode the site without cms made simple using more conventional xhtml, css and static pages. The recode has now given all pages new paths. How can i redirect an already redirected page. EXAMPLE. TEST.HTML has been redirected to TEST2.HTML TEST.HTML and TEST2.HTML now need to be redirected to TEST3.HTML Furthermore Is this frowned upon? Are the are consequences in doing this? What code should i use in the .hta access file? Hope this all make sense. I am a bit of a noob with redirects. Thanks in advance for any advice.
hi, You shouldn't be having duplicate content issues with using a 301 redirect. A 301 tells the browser or search engine spider that the page has been permanently moved. Something must be hosed with your 301 redirects if you're seeing duplicate content. As far as your problem goes... Is the data in TEST3.HTML going to essentially be the same data as TEST.html ??? If so, the smartest thing you could do is *not use a redirect* ... You should set up a development subdomain, for example, if your site is www.mysite .com, you would setup dev.mysite .com and redevelop your site there and when it's finished you can either copy the new files over the old files or if you have access to Apache (or whatever your webserver software is), edit the configuration file to point www.mysite .com at the directory your development subdomain is in. Otherwise, using a second 301 redirect isn't going to be that bad. I think search engine spiders will follow up to 5 redirects before quitting, so it's not as messy as you'd think.