Redirects – What to Use and When

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To define redirect broadly would be seen as a way of sending a browser (or search engine) from one web address to another.

Some commonly used redirects would be:

• Manual redirects – a document explicitly requests that a visitor follow a link to another page.
• Status code redirects – A browser (or search engine user agent) receives an HTTP status code telling it that the document at the address it is trying to visit has moved to a new address, either temporarily (a 302 status code) or permanently (a 301 status code).
• Meta refresh redirects – a Meta tag that tells a web browser to replace a source document with a target document after a delay specified in the meta tag (the amount of delay can be listed as “0″.
• Frame redirects – A source document includes an HTML frame that contains a target document
• JavaScript redirects – A document contains JavaScript that causes a web browser to redirect to a target document when the JavaScript is executed by the web browser
• Full screen pop-ups – A source document causes a full screen popup of a target document to be displayed.

Redirects can be used legitimately or for spamming. Some areas where redirects are considered legitimate are mentioned below:

• Start with the site internal redirects. Try and keep the internal redirects to a minimum. Removing the unnecessary redirects will also speed up the site. Sites that contain a high number of redirects that tend to redirect to multiple other pages, usually on other sites would be considered spammy.
• If you change your domain then you would have to redirect users to your new domain. This would involve using proper redirects from the addresses at the old domain to the new one (while actually changing the onsite URLs to reflect the new domain on the pages of your site.
• If you notice in your error log files that people are trying to reach a certain page on your site, but are following a wrong address because of a typo or common misspelling, you could set up a redirect so that those visitors find the correct pages.
• If your domain name is commonly misspelled, you might want to register the misspelling of the address and redirect traffic to the correct domain.

Some areas where the redirect can be considered spammy by search engines are mentioned below:

• Using a redirect to fool a search engine into serving a spammer’s page
• To confuse visitors as to which web page they are on to try to get them to reveal private information as part of a phishing attack.

About the author

Roberta Smith writes for http://www.marinadelreytoyota.com. She enjoys content and writing about the social sphere.

Tagged as: how to use redirects, redirect, redirects, types of redirects, web redirects, when to use redirects