X-Cart forums

[Jon]

^ To the best of my knowledge yes.

[lildawg]

I am not so sure about that. As in one of my sites in the root I use an index.php file that redirects the customer to the cart. I only have around 2000 products and google has 4040 links to my site they have both the php version indexed as well as the catalog/html version. It is more of a penalty if you redirect your customer from your domain to another domain and are just using a site as a doorway to your other site. As long as it is staying in the same url it appears you are fine. At least with my 60 websites I have never had a problem with it. Just my opinion though I could be wrong but as said I do not seem to have been penalized for it and have been doing it for a couple of years now.

[Jon]

^ Isn't it possible though that they are indexing those pages by coming to a different page and spidering through, and not working off your index redirect?

[coneme]

Hi,

I think I might have found an answer...

http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/articles/search-engine-problems/url-redirect-safe.php


It seems that a 301 (Permanent redirect) is the only safe redirect that Google won't penalise.

Thanks for your replies

[TelaFirma]

Using a meta refresh or a header redirect generates a 302 error code. A 302 is a temporary redirect and some search engines do not like that.

The reason that they do not like it is that it is a common thing for people to do to try to get better listings. They will register multiple domain names, create redirect pages to one single site and then register all the domain names with the search. Google "frowns" on this.

What you should have your site do is generate a 301 code for a redirect. This is a permanent redirect. The best way to do this is through the .htaccess file. You should create entries like this:

Redirect permanent /index.html http://www.yoursite.com/catalog/index.html 

Redirect permanent /index.php http://www.yoursite.com/catalog/index.html 

Redirect permanent /index.htm http://www.yoursite.com/catalog/index.html  

This assumes that this is the path to your catalog. It also covers all three instances of standard index pages that are configured with *NIX servers.

It is important that you precede each listing with Redirect permanent and not just Redirect. The former generates a 301 code and the later will still generate a 302 code.