Hum. Not very snappy title but I was having problems trying to work out how to say what the problem is without writing an essay.
So – the challenge is that you’ve got some web content and you want to move the pages elsewhere on your site or to a whole new domain.
The problem is that the content is static HTML pages, your web hosting does not let you use an htaccess, you have no access to server side scripting and no access to 301 or 302 redirects…
What do you do?
Well actually – those of you who have been through a blogger migration recently know pretty well how Google have dealt with this problem.
First of all you will need a meta refresh tag to take the human user to the new page:
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.newurl.com”>. In this case the 0 refers to the amount of time to wait before loading the new page.
You could also add a manual link for the user to click in case the meta refresh doesn’t work.
The meta refresh is great for the humans but we also need to tell the search engines which version of the page is the one that we want indexed. For this we need to add the canonical tag:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.newurl.com” />
This tells the search engines where the copy of the content is that we want indexed.
If you have Google Webmaster access for both domains then you could also login in there and go to “Site configuration” > “Change of address” to tell Google of the new URL.
And that’s it! A 301 redirect would be the most SEO friendly option but sometimes this just isn’t possible.
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