301 redirect on yahoo hosting

[jimmy0225]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone could lend some advice to getting a 301 redirect on yahoo web hosting;

I spoke with someone in SEO and they referred me to a site that had step by step instruction, the only problem is that was for the yahoo store, my business is not e commerce rather a service website.

I was wondering if anyone had the same problem, some say that Yahoo does not offer "301 redirects" on their hosting, however, they say there are methods to cirumvent that, my site is html.

Any suggestions would be great - thanks

best regards,

James C

[jimmy0225]

Hi Paul,

Hope all is good for you in the new year.  I just wanted to thank you for your great and articulate response regarding the use of 301's.

I have implemented your suggestion and - it works!  Thanks again.

Happy New Year

-Jimmy

[Dr-Pete]

I think Paul's got you on the right track, although I'll just add a couple of things:

(1) META Refresh can be a bit unpredictable, in terms of passing inbound linking power and SEO benefits. Google has generally recommended against using it the last couple of years.

(2) 301-redirects would be the preferred solution, but you could use rel=canonical in a pinch. It will generally help consolidate any duplicates and pass any inbound link "juice":

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

The disadvantage is what Paul discussed - canonical tags won't send the visitors to the canonical URL - they're only seen by search engines. The advantage is that you could create them within the HTML itself and don't need the Yahoo platform to support it.

I tend to agree with Paul, though - there are plenty of inexpensive hosting options that do support redirects. If it's important, it's worth considering a switch.

[ThompsonPaul]

Your question makes good sense, Jimmy, and happy to assist. The short answer is - yup, the kind of redirect you're talking about would help your site's ability to rank better.

The 301-redirect will definitely harness nearly all the value of the secondary version's  links and transfer that value to the main URL once you've done the redirect - that's the primary purpose of the process! Do note that without the redirect, it's not just the home page that has a duplicate, it's every page on your site! You essentially have two site competing against each other and diluting each other's authority.

How much immediate help you'd see would depend on how many incoming links the "alternate" page currently has (i.e. the URL you're going to redirect to the new "main" one) If it's an established site, it's best to find out which URL already has the greatest number of incoming links, and make that the main, while redirecting the lesser-linked version of the URL.

The other benefit of doing this is that visitors will now see only one version of the URL in their address bar, regardless of how they arrived at the site. That means it's much more likely that they'll use the correct URL if they choose to link to your site - meaning almost all future links will be to the correct URLs. This again helps avoid splitting future authority between two versions of your site.

Is that clearer?

Paul

P.S. Once the redirect is in place, you can also go into Google Webmaster Tools and use its tool to tell Google which version of the site (with www. or without) it should consider the primary address. This should be done in addition to the redirect, not just by itself. (Because it's only considered a hint by Google and it doesn't help solve the problem for the other search engines)

[jimmy0225]

Hi Paul,

Thanks so much for your response and for being so articulate.  I do have one question, because I know that transferring from one host to another one can be less than daunting, but more than easy (lol).  Does the DNS redirect provide any SEO benefit?  In other words, my site shows up better in SE results as: http://domain.com/ vs. http://www.domain/com/ ; I guess my questions is with the DNS redirect would I be able to harnessthe links that link to the www.domain/ if I chose to redirect all www.domain.com/ to http://domain.com/ ?

Hope that makes sense to you.  And thanks again for all of your help!

Jimmy

[ThompsonPaul]

What kind of redirect are you trying to do, Jimmy?

There is no facility for handling any kind of sophisticated SEO-friendly redirects on Yahoo's basic hosting that I'm aware of. It is a significant problem and would be more than enough to push me to move off their hosting if it were me.

That said - if it's something like canonicalisation redirecting (e.g. redirecting sitename.com to www.sitename.com), most DNS hosts - usually the company that hosts your domain name (not your website) - allow that kind of redirect to be created from within their admin panel.

If you're just trying to redirect a page so that users will get to the correct one (and don't care about the lost SEO) you can use what's called a meta-refresh to push the viewer to the new page.

You would add that line in your page's < head > section, where the content=5 means redirect the viewer after 5 seconds, and the url= part is the new page to which you want to send the viewer. This process is definitely NOT SEO-friendly and should be used sparingly.

Honestly, if you're taking your website seriously enough to be putting effort into optimising it for search engines, basic Yahoo hosting is unlikely to be satisfactory. There are plenty of other quality options at the same price point or even lower. It is a bit of effort to transfer to a new host, but it's not daunting and often your new host will help you migrate form the old one.

Paul