Setting Up Search Engine Friendly URL Redirects

Many companies use multiple URLs for the operation of their online business that are set up to redirect to their main website. The way in which these redirects are set up can have a dramatic effect on the success of your website on the search engines.

Two very popular ways in which a URL can be redirected to another web location are Meta Redirects and a Server Level Redirects, both can limit your search engine success.

- Meta Redirect -
A Meta Redirect is achieved by placing a Meta tag that simply tells the browser to move to another web location. This technique has been massively abused by Internet marketers to force visitors to places that they did not intend to go. Because of the potential for abuse to web searchers, the search engines do not like this method and can penalize or remove links that use this method. This type of redirect should only be used when you have no plans for marketing this URL on the search engines.

- Server Level Redirect -
Server Level Redirects are often used when multiple URLs are used, but only one server folder or account is desired. This is many times the case when a shopping cart or database is set up and it would not be feasible to duplicate the resource several times on various accounts or server folders. This method has been discovered to hinder websites from ranking successfully with many search engines.

The issue with this technique is that each domain name appears to be a fully functional website under that URL, which can trigger the search engines spam filters for duplicate content. For instance, if "marketed-url.com" and "additional-url.com" are pointing to the same server folder each link will be appended to that URL. So when you come in on the marketed-url.com URL and go to click on the aboutus.htm page the URL will read "marketed-url.com/aboutus.htm," however, if you enter in from the URL additional-url.com the aboutus.htm link will appear as "additional-url.com/aboutus.htm" as well. To the search engines this appears as two unique pages on two unique URLs with identical content.

The only Search Engine friendly way to use multiple domains for the same website content is to use a "301 redirect". This will only allow one website to be indexed into the search engines. We have assisted several clients in rectifying this situation and have recovered many lost rankings.

The "301 redirect" is a permanent redirect, when the search engines crawl this link once, they usually will not go back to that link, and instead they will only crawl the domain name it was redirected to. Another benefit to a "301 redirect" is that it can potently transfer link popularity from one domain to another.

If you believe that you may have URLs redirecting to your website in this manner,
please contact us at 480-657-7343 and regain your lost rankings and web traffic.