Any strategic Internet Marketer will tell you that page redirects will either dramatically hurt your search engine rankings or drastically improve them. It depends a lot on how you use the redirect, but most importantly which type of redirect you decide to use. their are typically only two redirects that are used most frequently. The first type, which is the "meta refresh" technique, only serves your web site's visitors and is not search engine friendly. The second, which is the 301 permanent redirect, will serve both your visitors and the search engines and improve your sites overall performance. First, let's understand what a redirect is and why it is used.

Redirects are a useful way of funneling traffic to a web page of your choosing. You might choose to funnel traffic for a number of different reasons such as having an expired web page that is still indexed in the search engines. You would simply redirect that page to a more recent one so that your traffic will continue to flow smoothly to your web site rather than be given the dreaded 404. Or, you may wish to use a few different domain names and direct them all to one "main" url. Whatever the case may be, if you're using the "meta redirect" instead of the 301 permanent redirect, you're killing your search engine rankings.

To better understand the effects of the two different redirect techniques, let's look at how a web browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox) reads them as compared to the search engines.

The code used to create the "meta refresh" type of redirect is:
meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=Your-Domain.com"

META HTTP-EQUIV - this tells the browser to find another HTTP equivalent item - another web page in other words.
REFRESH - tells the browser to refresh or reload the page after a certain time has passed. It also can tell the browser which page to refresh.
CONTENT - tells the browser the number of seconds to wait after the page loads until it refreshes.
URL - this is the url of the new page that should be opened when the browser refreshes.

A web browser will scan the page, find the refresh code and redirect to the new url. So how do search engine bots respond to this? That's easy - they don't! They don't scan the page or refresh the page to find the new one. They simply disregard it and keep going like they never even saw your web page.

So, the way we fix this problem is by adding a 301 permanent Redirect. This is a pretty simple tactic to implement (takes about 3 minutes), but could be very beneficial to your Search Engine Rankings. A 301 is implemented by inserting a single line of text in your ".htaccess" file on your server. It tells the search engines, that for instance, "yourdomain.com/page.html" will redirect to "yourdomain.com". The search engine will follow the url, index and rank the page, and pass along any Page Rank that it has with Google.

This is a really simple technique that is completely search friendly, and also a widely accepted method by those who know about it. Using the 301 permanent redirect properly along with some creativity and you can easily increase your search engine rankings for the keywords of your choice.