Web Page Redirects

strugglingam · 28-Feb-2005, 12:13 AM #1

Hello Fine Sages of Web Development Wisdom.
My queston is, I've purchased a domain name and it redirects to my actual site where I have my site hosted. Some search engines and sites tell me that redirects are bad.

Maybe this shows how much of a web idiot I am, but how do you purchase a domain name/web host that doesn't redirect? Do you have to purchase a web space provider from the same site that you buy the domain name from, or is there something else you do to get a real domain name that doesn't redirect for your site?

I'd appeciate any advice from the web savvy out there, thanks.

M.I.C.R.O.N · 28-Feb-2005, 12:36 AM #2

Redirects are not really bad, just have to make your meta tags have all the info for the search engines, if you submit the url and also the hosted url then googlebot, or msnbot will trawl them providing you have the robots.txt set to on.

Its only if you have a framed redirect thats the problem.

strugglingam · 28-Feb-2005, 08:04 AM #3

So what's a framed redirect and how do you avoid it? And do you have to have a specific robot.txt file or can the S.E.s find your site if you don't have one?

M.I.C.R.O.N · 28-Feb-2005, 08:17 AM #4

when you registered the domain, you will get the option to change the way it points to your new URL.

Options are:

Direct Redirect like A Name,Cname
NS and MX Settings. These are Name Servers and Mail servers. and requite an ip address or the domain eg. ns.yoursite.com mx.youesite.com

Also then your domain registrant will give you these are options:

A Name or A address - the url to your site

C Name - for pop or webmail

url redirect - this just points to another url and redirects the user, showing the hosted site in the url, not your new domain name.

Framed Redirect - this redirects the user but keeps your new domain address in the browser opposed to the original hosted address

Text - Rarely used

So you get the choice, best way if possible is to enter the NS and MX records.

As for robots, this is the meta info for one of my sites...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3c.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">
<HTML xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><HEAD><TITLE>IT Consultancy - eXPerience Windows</TITLE>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"
name=ROBOTS><LINK href="favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon"><LINK
href="xo_files/styles-site.css" type=text/css rel=stylesheet><LINK title=RSS
type=application/rss+xml rel=alternate>
<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" comment "ICRAonline EN v2.0" l gen true for "http://www.experiencewindows.co.uk" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cb 1) "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true for "http://experiencewindows.co.uk" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
<meta name="author" content="Michael Knight">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">
<meta name="description" content="experience windows is a Group for help, support and information with Windows Operating Systems and MSN Services. Join now for the latest news of future products from Microsoft; including the next Operating System codenamed Longhorn.">
<meta name="keywords" content="pc, help, support, microsoft, windows, xp, forensic investigation, barnstaple bideford, 98, free, forum, ME, 2000, support, technical, computer">
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.experiencewindows.co.uk/xo_files/faveicon.ico">
<meta name="description" content="We provide help and support to all windows platforms. Home, Business and Corporate support. We supply fixes, solutions and links to handy downloads.">

If you want Googlebot or MSNbot or any other web crawler/spider to view all your pages, the highlighted above should be in your meta tags. Search engine bots cannot read much past a framed redirect, so your meta tags must be concise.

Hope this helps

strugglingam · 01-Mar-2005, 08:26 AM #5

Thanks again for the advice, it was great.

M.I.C.R.O.N · 01-Mar-2005, 10:44 AM #6

If you need any further help, let us know.

Heatsink · 01-Mar-2005, 05:38 PM #7

Here's a link to my response to pretty much this same issue a a little while ago.

http://forums.techguy.org/t325873.html

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