Is it possible to redirect safely?

Does anyone know of a way to redirect a user instantly from a page to another, without Google penalizing it for what it is? i.e. Can I try to hide what I'm doing somehow from Google or other search spiders by somehow running the code in a different file somewhere that it has no access to?

This is called Cloaking, and when (not if) you eventually get caught, they will penalise you and ban your site from being listed in Google (and other search engines).

Yeah cloaking is bad news. You have to watch out for Google and other competitors reporting you.

Hmm.

So does cloaking also apply to a bit of javascript code that detects what browser type you have, and then redirects accordingly to a page designed for that browser?

But then I assume its not common practice to redirect to a different url (e.g. redirect from sitea.com/page_x.html to adifferentsite.com/page_y.html) just because someone has a different browser type.

The problem is, I'm actually redirecting from a page to another one with the exact same content, but due to legal reasons I'm not aloud to display ads on one server as opposed to the other server I'm redirecting to (and no, this isn't a pornography site or anything terribly terrible..).

So I know cloaking sucks...but is there a way to do it without incurring a death penalty?

Well, google isn't going to index ads anyway... It has filters to recognise ads & spam...

If your site is PHP based, simply use the header() function...


Both users and search engines will be redirected.

If I were a google/search engine engineer, and I saw any kind of redirection code on the page, I'd probably penalize it because any kind of redirection means that the page itself is not the right one.

Whats wrong with a simple message like:

"this website has moved to click here to visit"

A legitimate redirect which Google approves of is a 301:

http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.co ... t-safe.php

As others have mentioned, serving the spiders different content is cloaking which is bad news.

hth,
Bob