Wednesday, September 06, 2006

How do I redirect viewers to my new site?

Dear Fellow Bloggers,

This past weekend, I switched my blog from http://www.avenuefood.blogspot.com to http://www.avenuefood.com, recreating my site with GoDaddy’s Quick Blog. (And I’m glad I did—I'm happy with the site's new look and I haven’t experience photo upload problems like I often did with Blogger).

But to the point: I put a note on my Blogger site, with a link, telling people about the change. My question is this: is there a way to automatically redirect people to my new site when they visit the old, without them having to click on the link? Let me clarify further—is there a simple way to do this? (My technical skills are rudimentary, to state it generously.)

Thank you so much for any help you can provide!

--Sarah

10 comments:

William Conway said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
William Conway said...

{html}
{head}
{title}
{$BlogPageTitle$}
{/title}

{meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.yoursite.com"}

{/head}
{noembed}
{body}
{/noembed}

If you aren't redirected, please go to:{br}{br}

{a href="http://www.yoursite.com"}
http://www.yoursite.com
{/a}

{/body}
{/html}

William Conway said...

Use the above code for your template. It will automatically redirect to "yoursite.com".

If for some reason it doesn't (someone's using a REALLY old browser), it will display the link to your new place.

I also rename the old blog "Redirecting to yoursite.com" so that that appears in the title field.

William Conway said...

Oh, and replace the brackets with the correct punctuation

Sarah Kiino said...

Thanks William,

I tried it but it didn't work (due, I'm sure, to something or things I did wrong).

I just pasted the code into the template, then replaced every "yoursite" with "avenuefood".

What do you mean by replace the brackets with the correct punctuation? I'm pretty much HTML illiterate . . . Thanks, Sarah

sfcrotty said...

Hi Sara,

you need to replace the curly brackets with angle brackets. Compare some HTML code that works with William's example and you'll see the difference.

c

Sarah Kiino said...

Hooray--it worked! Thank you guys so much for your help.

--Sarah

RadiationWatch said...

Using meta refresh may incur a penalty from Google, since it's a commonly used tactic by spam sites. Some info here:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/000297.shtml

(also try searching for 'meta refresh Google penalty')

I'm not really sure if the 5 second delay they suggest avoids the penalty, but if you want to try that, change the 0 in content="0 to 5 or higher.

(301 'permanent' redirects are really best, but it's not possible to do with Blogger, Typepad or other hosted blog sites where you can't access the server.)

I recently moved my site also, but I've left the physical pages up there with a link to the moved page URL.

Julie said...

You mentioned that you don't have problems uploading photos now, as you did with blogger. I also use Go Daddy, but with the blogger software. Do you still use blogger, or did you build the website yourself? How do you upload photoes now, and how is that different from before? I too, have rudimentary technical skills...thanks!

Sarah Kiino said...

I stopped using Blogger altogether. I use GoDaddy's "Quick Blog," which has ready-to-use templates just like Blogger for the technically challenged like us.

Uploading the photos isn't all that different--it's just as easy as with Blogger, but in my experience, it works more consistently.

The only problem is Quick Blog doesn't automatically resize the photos, so you need to set your camera to the smallest setting and may need to manipulate the pictures a bit when creating your entry. Or I think if you have Photoshop, which I don't, you can resize them with that.

--Sarah