[OT] do web page redirects keep google ranking?

[Shachar Shemesh]

Or Czerninski wrote:
> Hi,
> Here you can find the entire process, step by step:
> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html
>
Eeww, top posting...

One important note beyond the link Or gave is to stress the "301" part. 
All of the "300" codes are redirects, and the article does not put a big 
enough stress on this point.

301 means "permanent redirect". If the RFC is to be believed, this means 
the request can be cached, bookmarks may be automatically updated, and 
anything else that needs to take place (i.e. - updating the search 
engine page rank) to facilitate the change. The URL is never coming back.

The most common way to produce redirects in Apache is mod_rewrite. The 
problem is that mod_rewrite produces 302 (found elsewhere). This code is 
for temporary redirects. The redirect may not be cached, bookmarks must 
not be updated, and in any other sense the pointer that led you to the 
original URL must still be considered valid. Understandably, Google will 
also not assign the previous page's rank to the new address, as the 
relocation is not considered permanent.

In mod_rewrite, to achieve 301 codes, either add [permanent] to the end 
of the rule, or [R=301].

Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com

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