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Tip #110 - Redirect? Misdirect!
Many, many moons ago, search engines were a bit stupid. And SEO consultants and web designers were a bit cleverer (or so we thought). And some bright spark worked out that the easiest way to have a site that looked amazing AND got great search engine listings was to have a redirect. A redirect is where the search engine is sent to a page (usually the index page) of a site, but then redirected almost immediately to another page. It can be done by the use of a META redirect tag, or using Javascript. The first page is optimised for great search engine listings, and has all the required elements. The second page looks brilliant but has no optimisation (usually because the designer thinks that designing for search engines compromises the design of the site). Reasons for doing it? The site might be a Flash site, it might be all graphics, maybe the SEO consultant came along late to the project and it was too late to make the site search engine friendly. Sounds fine, right? The search engine gets what it wants and needs, and the website owner gets his or her fab site seen as it was intended to be. Everyone should be happy. Well, like a lot of ‘tricks’, the search engines soon caught on, and it stopped working. In the best case scenario, the search engine will ignore the original page and index the page that it is redirected to - so it’s a pointless exercise, as the second page probably hasn’t been optimised at all. In the worst case scenario, your site will be banned for spam type tactics. Google clearly states that you shouldn’t do this, because: “… it violates the webmaster guidelines to embed a link in Javascript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees. When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot, and can take a visitor somewhere other than where they intended to go.“ It’s really not worth taking the risk - if your site has a redirect on the front page (for SEO or any other reason) feel free to drop me a line and I’ll take a look. Tip #11 tomorrow! (If you can’t wait for all 299 you could Buy The Book now… |
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