JLH Design

If you own a website you no doubt receive hundreds of link request emails ranging from honest people to three-way-exchanges, and even to the following deceptive scams:

I received the following email:

Hello,

Recently I visited your website http://www.jlh-design.com ; while visiting your site I noticed that you link to http://andybeard.eu at this address: http://www.jlh-design.com/2007/08/warnings-google-needs-to-incorporate/. As we are closely related to them, I would love to exchange links with your website, currently there are about 5,000 - 7,000 people per day that goto my site and search for information, Therefore I would to link to an excellent site like yours.

I have taken the liberty of adding your site to my home page: http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com to determine if it is of any benefit to you, if you have a stats program you can check it and let me know. By looking at my stats, it looks like today I have sent you 38 visitors but it may change by the time you receive this email.

Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask first. I think the information on your website could be useful to my visitors; and maybe you could receive some extra relevant traffic if you want. Please get back to me when you have a chance to let me know if its ok to link to your website like this.

Have a good week,

Melissa Thompson
——————————————————————————–

email: melissa.thompson@torontorealestatedirect.com
website: http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com
Ref: KNdNB

This email was sent to xxxxx, by melissa.thompson@torontorealestatedirect.com

| 108 Chestnut Street | Toronto | Ontario | Canada

Melissa seems like a nice enough person, wanting my permission to link to me an all….but let’s take a look at her offer a little further.

The first link in the email was actually to http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com/?pg=KNdNB

Note the parameter tagged onto the end.

Visiting that link, which wasn’t visible as the linked text in the email, will send your browser on the following little wild goose chase:

GET /?pg=KNdNB HTTP/1.1
Host: www.torontorealestatedirect.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: estate=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jlh-design.com

HTTP/1.x 302 Found
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:55:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
X-Pingback: http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com/toronto/xmlrpc.php
Set-Cookie: estate=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jlh-design.com; expires=Thu, 31-Dec-2015 07:00:00 GMT
Location: http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
———————————————————-
http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.torontorealestatedirect.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: estate=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jlh-design.com

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:55:52 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
X-Pingback: http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com/toronto/xmlrpc.php
Set-Cookie: estate=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jlh-design.com; expires=Thu, 31-Dec-2015 07:00:00 GMT
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

What the cookie “estate” does until 31-Dec-2015 is inject my domain into the code:

<h2>Recommended Sites</h2>
<ul>
	<li><a title="Jlh-design" href="http://www.jlh-design.com">Jlh-design</a></li>
	<li><a title="Toronto Real Estate Board" href="http://www.torontorealestateboard.com/">Toronto Real Estate Board</a></li>
	<li><a title="Toronto Condos" href="http://www.toronto-condominium-homes.com/">Toronto Condos</a></li>
	<li><a title="Realtor" href="http://www.realtor.com/toronto/">Realtor</a></li>
</ul>

So whenever I’d visit the domain I’d see my fine link sitting there, thinking I got myself a sweet deal. This little spamming technique is just too crooked for me to let go and I figured I warn any webmaster who happens across this and a link request from Melissa Thompson of torontorealestatedirect.com. I wonder how many of the 32,000 links are real?

With the retirement of the original Google Webmaster Help Group my list of Helping Googlers now only points to archives of what Googler’s have said and will not have any new information. With the introduction of the new Google Webmaster Help Forum this list will include the active Googlers in the new forum.

• Adi
• Balázs
• Char
• Chris
• Matt Cutts
• Oliver Fisher
• Jessica
• Koti
• Adam Lasnik
• Matt
• Susan Moskwa
• Nathan
• Maile Ohye
• Jayan
• John Mueller
• Reid
• Riona
• SagarK
• Jonathan Simon
• Evan T
• Wysz

These names were harvested from Reintroducing your English Webmaster Help Google Guides suggested by an astute webmaster if you are interested in what they haven’t found yet in Google follow that link.  The links I provide go to their Webmaster Help Forum Profile.

This list will be updated as new Googlers migrate to the new forum.

Note: With the new system the profiles only show “questions” asked by the individual and not any answers (which is most important to us for Googlers) but I am told that feature has been requested.

The new help format by Google has now been enabled for Webmaster Issues.

Located at: Webmasters Help

It’s been pre-seeded with frequently asked questions by Susan Moskwa already and appears to be open for business. No announcements yet on the fate of the old Google Webmaster Help Group.

For a list of participating Googlers see my constantly updated page of Google Webmaster Help Forum Googlers.

Update: 11/4/08 added Jayan

I’d like to introduce four Five new Googlers to the Google Webmaster Help Group.

Jayan

Hey Guys,

My name is Jayan, and I work with Google’s Search Quality Team. My
personal blog is still a work in progress so I will definitely be
asking around for some help on that. I am looking forward to helping
around the group as much as possible and learning from you guys in the
process.

On the personal front: When not glued on to the internet, I spend most
of my waking hours catching up on movies and football games (Go
Arsenal!!). I am a self confessed Music Junkie/Gaming addict. I still
play Counter-Strike till my eyes actually hurt. I love reading,
traveling and indulge myself with adventure sports whenever I get the
opportunity. This was a recent skydiving video of mine -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mYgqhzrvyc . Oh, and did I mention I
work out of Google India’s Hyderabad office?

Cheers,
Jayan.

dLux

I am dLux, I work at Google Switzerland. I am a Googler in the Search
Quality Team.

My personal homepage is at www.dlux.hu, I like photography, especially
the beautiful mountains in Switzerland and sometimes I feel an urge to
sing, too. As you can see I originally came from Hungary, and I still
like that region very much.

I feel honoured to work in Google (it was my dream since I’ve finished
the university in 2002) and to help you guys who use our products!

Oliver Fisher

I’m Oliver Fisher, yet another Googler. I spend my time working on
Google’s anti-malware efforts (http://
googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2008/10/malware-we-dont-need-no-
stinking.html).

I like long walks on the beach, romantic sunsets… Oh, wrong sort of
profile…

I work with Google’s Montreal engineering office but live in Ottawa.
Fortunately, many days I’m able to work from home - so No Pants Day
isn’t a special occasion for me. When not sitting in front of a
computer screen, I often sit in front of a blank wall practicing Zen.

For those already smitten, http://oliverfisher.blogspot.com is my
personal blog. Its PageRank is so low that I should be fired.

O.

Christopher W.

Hey gang,

I’m Chris from the Search Quality team, and I thought I’d stop by and
introduce myself before I start helping out in this group.

Most of my time online is in Google Reader, trying to keep up on new
music, politics, design, and, of course, webmasters. My site is mostly
a tumblelog-style collection of things I’m into, and hopefully a
showcase for some music and programming projects in the future.
Offline, I’m usually reading, seeing films, taking photos, playing
music, tinkering with something, or having adventures around San
Francisco.

Oh, and when I have a rare, spare moment from Search Quality, I work
on the Authors@Google team. You can check out our events on Youtube
( http://www.youtube.com/atgoogletalks ), if you’re curious.

I’m really looking forward to getting to know more of you, and helping
out with any issues you might be having.

See you around,
Chris

Adi Goradia

Hellooo Everyone,

I’m Adi a recent addition to the U2U as well as a member of the Search
Quality team here at Google.

Like my buddy Chris, I keep a close eye on new music and try to get
out to all the shows going on in San Francisco. Most recently I saw
the Notwist; if you have a chance, check out their song Gloomy Planets
(the song is much more lighthearted and uplifting than the title
suggests - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2qKfzIpoQg ). Before this,
I studied computer arts and new media production, which ended up in a
lot of web projects — and that’s how I found myself here, working
with webmasters.

I’m excited to help out and I’m looking forward to learning some new
things from all of you.

- Adi

The timeless classic list of GWHG Googlers has been updated. This on the heals of the best month ever with over 10,000 posts.

Reid from Google Webmaster Help Group fame, search quality fortune, and Google glory offered some more answers to more webmaster questions. You can watch the video for his answers.

Even More Webmaster Questions

He answered an interesting question that’s been tested several times by several people but this is the first official mention I can recall.

….wanted to know if Google will follow links on a page using the “noindex” attribute in the “robots” meta tag. To answer this question, Googlebot will follow links on a page which uses the meta “noindex” tag, but that page will not appear in our search results…

What does that mean for you? Well if you’ve got nosy competitors wandering around your link profile as some like to do you can still feed links to a site but keep that page out of the index and away from prying eyes (besides of course through navigation and other lesser search engines). It’s an old trick now but a good one to keep in the arsenal, specially for initial feeder links.

I originally hinted at this in my Don’t Use Robots.txt to Control Indexing post.

A follow up question I’d have is whether or not pages that are not indexed and blocked from being so have to conform to webmaster guidelines or does the site pay a price for having non-conforming pages that are not indexed?  I’ll leave it to the reader to think of the loopholes that exist for either possible answer to that question.

I’m sure the millions of readers headed my warning about Twitter caving to mattcuttsean-like pressures and nofollowing everything on your profile back on 7/22/08. So this is no surprise to you, but twitter has finally pulled the plug on that loophole.

The web educated amongst you will add twitter.com to your well maintained nofollow reciprocity list in your plug-ins I’m sure.

As pointed out in my original post, I still find it incredibly stunning that @mattcutts offers @ev advice on furthering the nofollow carnage while ignoring the actually helpful advice that would #1) decrease their server load, and #2) decrease Google’s own crawler load.

I guess we’ll see who twitter is more interested in pleasing, it’s users by reducing the server load with a simple url canonicalization fix or Google with their cure-all rel=”nofollow”, by which is fixed first.

I’m not sure if it’s because lcase() is so hard for them to implement or that bowing to Google’s pressure is more important for the eventual buyout price, but their problems persist, now with the added benefit of HTTPS versions! Nice.

As always and of course follow me on Twitter I’ll follow you back if you #1) update regularly and #2) don’t use it primarily as a bastardized IM service with too many ‘@’ twits.

It seems a day doesn’t go by in GWHG that someone is concerned that some page that they blocked in their robots.txt file is showing up in Google. Google’s handling of the robots.txt is quite elaborate, well documented, and easily tested. Having said all of that many do not fully understand the intent of robots.txt and how the opportunity to use it for optimization of a web site.

Any discussion of robots.txt cannot be complete without the caveat that only GOOD robots follow it and it’s a very public file, so don’t expect it to keep out rouge bots or as a security measure to keep stuff hidden. That being said, I’d like to talk about an obedient bot, googlebot.

As elaborate or simple as your robots.txt may be it accomplishes one thing it directs the crawler where it can and cannot go explicitly by disallowing some pages/folders or indirectly by only allowing certain pages and blocking others. Stopping the crawler from crawling a page should not be confused with giving it direction on what to do with that page. As a matter of fact Google will indeed index urls that explicitly blocked by the robots.txt file. Since they cannot crawl them they really don’t know what’s on the page so the URL will often be listed as URL only without a Title or description (snippet). Sometimes if they can find the information elsewhere like the ODP they’ll use that to help fill in the blanks.

I don’t know exactly what threshold exists for the decision to include a URL that’s blocked by robots.txt but I’d imagine as with anything Google it has something to do with the quantity and quality of links pointing to it. That being said, and as anyone who’s trying to rank something in Google knows, those links are gold and not to be taken too lightly. Most honest-to-goodness real links start out in someones browser bar. They’ve navigated to a page and found it interesting enough to tell others about it by cutting-n-pasting the URL into some sort of HTML somewhere. It would be a crying shame if Google were to follow that link only to be blocked by a robots.txt and not be able to transfer any value to the site other than to list the URL as URL-only in the search results, which will more than likely only ever be shown for a search on the anchor text, which may actually only be “click here“.

Say Matt Cutts really wants to rip into me with one of his famous debunking posts. In part of his article he really wants to show how often I speak of Google on this blog. To emphasis that fact he may link to an internal site search page like: http://www.jlh-design.com/?s=google which will find all the posts here that use the word Google. Being a good webmaster I don’t want Google to return my search results in their search results as we’ve been warned not to.

I could block all search results from being crawled in my robots.txt with something like this:

1
2

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=*

Which will keep Google from crawling that URL. However a link from Matt Cutts is prized and rare so I may want to take advantage of it when it does come around.

The better option is to allow the URL to be crawled but stop Google from indexing it via a robots meta tag.

1

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow,noodp,noydir" />

The page that Matt linked to does contain all of my site’s navigation pointing to previous posts, the home page, categories etc, that I’d like indexed and ranked. Allowing Google to crawl the page and follow the links while stopping it from being indexed accomplishes the goal of keeping it out of the index but passing value to the site as a whole.

For a fine example of this in the wild let’s take a renowned SEO site SEOmoz who has this in their robots.txt file.

1
2

User-agent: *
Disallow: /ugc/category/

Yet Google has 28 URL-only pages indexed currently. (screenshot)

So remember that robots.txt doesn’t stop a page from being indexed it does however stop the page from passing any value to your site if they can’t crawl it. Using the robots noindex meta tag will control indexing but allow crawling for discovery of other links on the page.

Publish or perish is a term used in academia used to describe the notion that one must publish on a consistent basis to sustain their career and prestige within their institution and among their colleagues. The concept was no more apparent than tonight in a monthly review of this site’s statistics. I offer you this small snapshot:

The trend is not what you’d like to see in the normal development of a site. Notice that uniques, visits, and pages are all down by at least 50% this month compared to last month, this after a reasonably steady natural growth rate.

Upon further inspection the search engine traffic is right where is normally is, reader’s per post is within normal range, but the large disparity is that “other sites” category. The normally (normal for me anyway) largest source of traffic which is other sites, type ins, bookmarks, social media, etc.

Admittedly posting and quality of content has been down lately as other pressing needs and sites have become more important than this small blog but trend is an important lesson in web publishing. If you’re (by ‘you’ I mean I) are not putting forth the effort to publish new and compelling material you’re also not spending enough time on promotion of the material. What can be more of an example than a loss of nearly 100,000 pageviews in a single month? Blog type formats may be more susceptible to this as the content tends to be timely in nature and rely much less on search engines supplying the visitors than normal information or commerce type sites.

In all the ongoing discussion of Google search results, links, optimisation, etc I think what’s often lost in the discourse is a less than concrete concept of passion. When I write or publish something that I’m excited about I get passionate about it and I want to share that passion with other readers. Saying something you believe in isn’t enough you want others to hear it. Given the flakiness and uncontrollable nature of search refers I tend to promote ideas I’m passionate through other means and that can be seen in the site’s stats. It’s not all about Google when it comes to a site’s readership, involvement and ultimately conversion it’s about engaging the audience and bringing them to the site first.

I half expect to see next months search referrals to be down as well. With 100,000 less pageviews this month that’s 100,000 less chances for someone to be inspired to provide a link and share the information. Negative link acceleration on a site can be the death knell for it in the natural rankings and those tend to lag reality by a few weeks. It should be noted that the lack of publishing really started (or stopped as the case may be) in June and continued in July, only now is the fall out being able to be seen and graphed.

I’m not making any promises on being more engaging on this site in the near future but I have made a mental note of the affects of passionate involvement and hope to further cultivate that in other projects.

In case you missed it “Bergy” Berghausen announced that he is leaving Google and moving on to pursue a career path in the legal profession.

His goodbye is here:

Hi folks!

I am extremely grateful for the time I’ve been able to spend
monitoring this group–responding to questions, watching threads,
reading all the new “Introduce yourself” posts, and being consistently
amazed at the speed with which some of our users can type.  This has
become my home online and holds a very special place in my heart,
though with great regret I must announce that my time monitoring this
group in an official capacity has come to an end.

I have made a very tough decision to leave my position at Google to
follow my calling to join the legal profession, and today is my last
day on the job.  It’s been a wonderful time, and I would like to thank
all of you, especially beussery for his great attitude and Flash
expertise, webado for her untiring dedication and mod_rewrite
expertise, and Autocrat for his sense of humor and for his rocket-
speed ascent from being an occasional poster to the second most
frequent in a matter of a few weeks.

It’s been a lot of fun spending time with you here.  Also, this isn’t
exactly goodbye either, since I will definitely be stopping by without
my big blug [G] and contributing in my personal capacity when I’m not
reading about contracts or rules of evidence.  :-)

So, thanks for helping each other–keep on posting!
-Bergy

Good luck Bergy and thank you very much for your all of your help in webmastering issues!

I’ve spotted a new Googler (new to me) helping out in GWHG. Everyone welcome Chark to the fray. The list of Google Help(ers) has been updated as well.

From Chark’s introduction:

I’m Char, another Googler from Search Quality here to help out in the
Webmaster Help Group.

My foray into webmastering began with a personal photo gallery site I
created years ago, which looks like it is perpetually stuck in the
nineties. To redeem myself, I helped my last company bring its website
out of the nineties. Currently, I co-author a personal blog and am
working on setting up a personal website to host my own music fluff
(domain name TBD).

In addition to creating music fluff, I also like listening to all
sorts of music, trying different kinds of food, wandering around in
general, and learning about people.

I look forward to getting to know many of you and being involved in
this already very active and supportive community=). Thank you for
having me.

I promise no more RickRolling, and apologize to the 100+ people yesterday that were redirected…this is real.

The Google Webmaster Chat was a huge success as reported in many prominent places such as Search Engine Roundtable.

The online chat involved several multi-media avenues in which to communicate between the many Googlers who participated in the meeting and the 200+ webmasters.

1. A free-for-all chat room type interface, the transcript of which can be read here. [PDF]
2. A question and answer section where webmasters posted questions and Googlers answered, the transcript is located here. [PDF]
3. Webmasters called in, or were called, to listen into the presentation by a dozen or so Googlers in conference call with Googlers in Mountain View, Kirkland, and Zurich. The audio recording of that section was saved in this Brasil SEO site.

My Portuguese skills are little rusty don’t exist, but according to the Google Translation it appears as the author is recommending you download the files, which I did. To help save his bandwidth I’ve mirrored the files here, be sure to link to the original source in your own discussion.

Audio Chat Part 1 (mp3)

Audio Chat Part 2 (mp3)

Audio Chat Part 3 (mp3)

Note: The much debated PageRank sculpting discussion starts right at the beginning of part 3.

A transcribed version of the audio portion can be found here.

The Google Webmaster Help Group which I participate in has been inundated with spam lately from a certain spammer looking to push the 2008 Peking Olympic Games Souvenirs.

As seen below”

You will notice that the group’s CMS nofollows all links in a post which would make you wonder, “why would someone go to so much effort to bother spamming the groups?”

The answer is: Because it works. Well. Very well.

More and more people have been complaining lately that after discussing their site in GWHG that the thread will outrank their own site. Of course some of the sites discussed in the group are indeed penalized and just about anything will outrank it, but it has been noted the groups are getting more visible in the SERPS lately. The fact is that Groups material is indexed quickly and ranks quite well, irregardless regardless of content or value. Another aspect working for the Google Groups Spammer is the fact that Google has the groups in many languages all on their own TLD, in essence replicating their spam on many more URLs than just the one they planted it on.

The spammer may not be getting any link love from the Google Groups spam pointing to 200836.com but for his keyword phrase, “Peking 2008 Olympic Games”, he’s doing remarkably well in Google.

In the first 100 results Google Groups spam occupies 23 positions (screenshot). To be fair to Google, they aren’t the only target of this spammer as some Yahoo! groups and other forums are also spammed, for a total of 40 of the top results (screenshot). By any standard 40% of a search result being spam drops is not good.

With this Minty Fresh Spamdexing the spammers no longer have to worry about the links they generate but rather use the forums themselves as doorways to their spam site, which by the way is indexed.

There are million of various theories out there about how to find out if your site is penalized by Google. I thought I’d recap what Google officially says, and by officially I mean on their domain and bearing their brand. Their help system is a bit scattered so I may have missed some.

1. Verify that your site ranks for your domain name (reference)

Do a Google search for www.[yourdomain].com. If your site doesn’t appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, this is a sign that your site may be penalized for violations of the webmaster guidelines.

Brian White of Google notes that inside Google the nomenclature with the brackets used above indicates what is actually typed in the search box. So when they say to search for www.[yourdomain].com, they actually mean that you would search for yourdomain and not include the www, com, or the surrounding dots.

2. Message Center (reference 1, reference 2)

If we find certain problems with your site - for example, malware - we’ll let you know via the Message Center

we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners.

3. PageRank of Zero (reference 1, reference 2)

Google believes the site violates our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

4. Removed from the index (reference 1 , reference 2 , there are more but you get the point)

If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

and

if our review indicated that you engaged in deceptive practices and your site has been removed from our search results

5. Noted on your Summary Page (reference)

Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.

Note: Emails from Google were stopped in August 2007 due to spoofers and scammers.

I’ve seen quite a few people in Google’s webmaster help group ask how to verify their site for webmaster tools when using a Googlepages website. I took a cursory look and couldn’t find any online documentation so I tried it myself. The procedure I used is outlined below with screen shots. There may be a better way out there, but I know this one works.

1. First sign into Webmaster Tools and go to the dashboard where you will see a box to add your site. Type in your googlepages sites name here, just mysite.googlepages.com, with no ‘/home’ or any other subfolders or file names.

2. You’ll then be prompted with a link as the next step to verify your site, click that.

3. They will then ask you for a method to verify with a pull down that says, “choose verification method…” You’ll want to select the “Upload HTML File” Method.

4. After you’ve chosen your method, the next screen will show you a file name. This is the file you will need to create to upload to your Googlepages site. I just highlighted the file name, opened up my text editor application (in my case its notepad), then picked ’save as’, when prompted for the name I pasted the file name that Google gave me, and hit save. The file can be blank like that, as Google is only going to look for its existence, not what’s in it.

5. In another tab or another browser session open up your Googlepages account, and under your site manager, to the right you’ll see a box appropriately name “uploaded stuff.” Select the link [upload] (if you have files there already) or select the ‘browse’ button. You’ll then need to browse to the location of the file you saved in the previous step.

6. The final step is to go back to your Webmaster Tools account and click the ‘verify’ button. The response should be almost instant where you will see the verified screen. Now go and enjoy all the benefits that being a verified owner of a site offers you.

I’ve gone over adding a domain wide 301 redirects before in IIS to fix the www and non-www canonicalization issues, but the same issue also comes up for individual pages as well.

For an old page that is a .asp page adding the following code to the top of the page will perform the redirect. You can get rid of all other content on the page, as no browser or crawler will see it once they receive the 301 redirect.


<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", " http://www.example.com/newpage.asp"
Response.End
%>

That only works for pages with extensions set up to parse the asp code. A lot of times, specially on shared hosting environments, other pages with static extensions such as .html, .pdf, .txt, etc will not execute the code. With a little trickery we can accomplish that as well.

Let’s say you have the old file that you want to 301 redirect, for example:

www.example.com/old_directory/oldpage.html

Which you’d like to redirect to the new location:

www.example.com/new_directory/newpage.html

If you were to add the above code to newpage.html nothing would happen, or even the code would show up as text on the page, as more than likely your server is not set up to execute the code. Here’s what you can do:

1. Delete (or rename it to save it for a rollback) the oldpage.html file located in /old_directory/
2. Create a new sub-folder (note: it’s a folder not a file) under /old_directory/ with the same name as the file you just deleted, in this example you’d create a sub-folder named ‘oldpage.html’ like /old_directory/oldpage.html/.
3. In that folder you just created you will then create a default asp file to execute the redirect code, this can be different depending on how your site is set up, but generally it is default.asp, such as you now have a page located at /old_directory/oldpage.html/default.asp
4. in that default.asp you will want to add the following code:


<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", " http://www.example.com/new_directory/newpage.html"
Response.End
%>

That’s it you’re done. Now when someone or a crawler visits the old page, they will be 301 redirected to the new location. As stated before this also works for other static pages such as .PDF, .DOC, .TXT, .HTM , etc.

For example if you visit this page, which appears like it was a PDF:

www.hvac-direct.com/pdfs/oldfile.pdf

You should be automatically redirected to a new html file in a folder:

http://www.hvac-direct.com/html-version/

To see that is actually a 301 redirect view the response on the oyoy.eu tools. Note: that it’s a double redirect because of the lack of trailing slash on that server set-up, but it’s better than returning a 404!