[TJ]

What are your thoughts on this?

[loxly]

It depends on the type of redirect. Redirects from htaccess and at the server level seem to be very good, but meta refresh redirects are very bad.

I use htaccess redirects and if it is just a few pages or a specific page, I make appropriate links on the existing page so all the existing SEO is still there, but when the visitor clicks, they go to the new place I want them to be.

[markymark]

Depends on what you're trying to do. If you're using any kind of redirect to deliver Google one page and your visitors a different one, then that's spam, by Google's definition. Pretty much all other uses of a redirect script are acceptable to the search engines though.

[TJ]

Right, I was talking a simple jump.php type script. I thought I read recently that it might be bad, but I can't find the post now.

[TJ]

hmmmm bad is slightly ahead now.... I wonder why? Anyone care to elaborate?

[yintercept]

Redirect scripts can have unanticipated results. Sometimes Google records the redirect rather than the destination URL.

Case in point: While playing with different ideas, I made a page with a random URL redirect. The random.php URL would load one of about 50 URLs.

One day, I get a call from an absolutely livid webmaster. For some odd reason, Google had recorded my random.php URL with the information with his site. So, when this person searched on the name of his site, google showed his page with my random.php link.

When the webmaster clicked on random.php, he would go to a random site.

In other words. Google's handling of redirects is not what it should be.

For affiliate marketing, I use jump.php type scripts, but I make sure I exclude jump.php in robots.txt.

[TJ]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>For affiliate marketing, I use jump.php type scripts, but I make sure I exclude jump.php in robots.txt. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>Can you use wildcards on filenames in robots.txt... recently I tried excluding some pages, but google continues to spider them, and I figure its because of the session ID's

[ScottyB]

I use a redirect, and exclude it in robots.txt via the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: go.php

Seems to work just fine. Also, I figure it must keep the robots on my site a little longer before finding their way out...

As far as Google still spidering recently disallowed pages... ya got me...

ScottyB

[markymark]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Google's handling of redirects is not what it should be <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Google's handling of redirects is OK. It follows 301s just fine and attributes them correctly. The problem is likely to be with the status code of your redirect script.

As for following 'disallowed' redirects. Firstly, you need to allow time for Google to drop the link. Secondly, you need to remember that Google is perfectly capable of showing pages it has never visited in its index. This isn't anything to do with robots.txt, more to do with Google's use of anchor text as part of their algo.

[TJ]

Well, I did some experimenting today... did a redirect to a folder that is forbidden in robots.txt, using htaccess and google followed that link quite niceley into the "forbidden" folder.... I'm trying a bunch of methods and I'll report back what is successful