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Old 10-11-2012, 10:29 AM
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Default Re: Redirect to Product Page when only One product in category

Search engines don't like pages that load, and then do a refresh. This technique used to be quite popular in the early days where people would create doorway pages and then use javascript or meta refresh to redirect. Such redirects are also common with virus that try to hijack the user sending them away from their intended destination. More recently, some similar things have been done for the purpose of "302 Hijacking."

Here's an expert from someone who works at Google, I believe it was John Mueller:

Quote:
I would strongly recommend not using meta refresh-type or JavaScript redirects like that if you have changed your URLs. Instead of using those kinds of redirects, try to have your server do a normal 301 redirect. Search engines might recognize the JavaScript or meta refresh-type redirects, but that's not something I would count on -- a clear 301 redirect is always much better.

Personally, I would either:

1) Do nothing. Have the user click on my category, then click on my one product. This allows the category and my page to be indexed, so that in the future if and when I do add more items to the category, the category is indexed.

2) Customize my navigation so that when there is only one item in a category, it automatically links to the product in the navigation by replacing the category url with the product url.

3) Customize my category code in php to check the product count in a category, and do a 301 redirect to the product if the category has one item. I would code this so that it happens automatically.

I would recommend #1 or #3 but wouldn't recommend the method in this thread for anyone no matter if they are using CDSEO or not (though the previous code provided in this thread for CDSEO should work for anyone who chooses to do so).
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