How is it possible to redirect a good ranking page to another new page without hurting the rankings in the Google SERPs of th eold page, or other search engines for that matter? I have read that meta redirects are seen as spam, that many other webmasters use javascript redirects, especially affiliate marketers. Is this the best way? Any ideas please? Thank you Terry
Besy way would be a 301 permanent redirect, you can do this via htaccess, php, asp, jsp etc. Which language are you using?
I can use PHP and htaccess, I can also create permanent URL's in my control panel, I'm just worried in case it ruins my current rankings in Google. Terry
As long as you use permanent redirects you'll be fine, can't really say much about rankings as it does also depend on the domain (age and status) aswell as the url structure ... amongst other things. Changing domains is never recommended, only do so if you must.
I used 301 on one of my sites. Changed the URLs from examplesite4353.com/34234.html to examplesite4353.com/all-about-the-page.html. The ranking dropped for about a week, but returned even higher than it was before. This was about a year or so ago. Don't know what a current change would do in Google ranking. Maybe try it with one of your less popular pages first. See what happens, then if you get good results go page by page...if its not a huge site. Last I remember, Google suggested 301 for a permanent change of address.
Ok cool, thanks for the replys. What if say I was to redirect a page to an affiliate link? Would it pass relevancy over to the affiliate site or deem link relevancy of my holding page as void? I can imagine passing one page to another on the same domain should be okay, but passing to an affiliate link, will this make any difference? Thanks Terry