I recently decided to change all of my page urls to more search engine friendly terms. I didn't want to lose potential visitors to my site in the interim so I created redirects from my old urls (many of which currently show up in google searches) to my new urls. I tried to do a 301 redirect but I couldn't get it to work with yahoo sitebuilder. Yahoo told me this is the best method: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://my site.com/page.html"> then I erased all of the old pages from my sitemap, erased all of the content on the pages and added the following to try to prevent the old urls from being crawled: <meta name="robots"'content="noindex". my fear is that search engines, google especially, will think that I'm trying to do some sort of shady cloaking activity to double my traffic and will penalize my site. Should I be worried? And is there a better method, using yahoo sitebuilder, for redirecting my pages? Whatever method I used, I anticipate using it for several months- until all my images are indexed because I rely heavily on google image searches. thanks for your help.
if you use robot tag with noindex, then there will not be any dup content issue. btw, you dont need to use sitebuilder for 301 redirect. you just edit the htaccess file with 301 redirect code and then upload it to your server. you will need unix/linus hosting for that, it htaccess redirect will not work if you are using windows hosting
Thanks Sultan, I'm kind of new at this but it sounds like you're saying that by using the robot tag, I'm saving myself from getting penalized? Regarding the htaccess, yahoo has a linux sever but I wasn't able to upload an .htaccess file. it told me it was an improper name. maybe it doesn't matter though if my method works and won't penalize me?