Adios Means Goodbye – Browser 301 Redirects In All Languages

Written by David Walsh on Thursday, August 30, 2007

Browser redirects, especially 301 “permanent” redirects, are essential to all good web applications. Regardless of language, browser redirects can:

• provide safe URL forwarding to gather GET and POST variables and process them without risking data and processing integrity by a browser refresh
• send users and search engine bots to the new location of a page or entire website
• maintain search engine rank and avoid 404 errors

Here’s the list of browser redirects using various languages:

.htaccess

redirect 301 / http://www.davidwalsh.name/

ASP

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.davidwalsh.name/");

ASP.NET

%MINIFYHTML750e69f85f3c9eacea46ba3be0074d386%

ColdFusion

<CFHEADER statuscode="301" statustext="Moved Permanently">
<CFHEADERname="Location" value="http://www.davidwalsh.name">

Javascript (NOT a 301)

//window.location.href = 'http://www.davidwalsh.name/';

Java JSP

response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader("Location", "http://www.davidwalsh.name/");
response.setHeader("Connection", "close");

Meta tag (NOT a 301)

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.davidwalsh.name/" />

Perl

use strict;
print "Status: 301 Moved Permanantlyn";
print "Location: http://www.davidwalsh.name";
exit;

PHP

header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://www.davidwalsh.name');

Ruby On Rails

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.davidwalsh.name/"
end

Do you have any more redirect scripts? If so, post them below!

Epic Discussion

September 09 / #

Winikkach says:

I’m most comfortable with php and asp, but what happens when you’ve been coding straight html (index.html), and you move to a new domain? How do you not lose search engine ranking when you have to use asp or php for your 301 redirect? Isn’t search engine ranking based on the actual page (not the domain)?

Did I shoot myself in the foot by having done all the SEP for my *.html pages, or can a simple move to default.asp with the redirect work?

There’s one other proposition, and that’s that I’m missing something entirely here (like some code to put on the server that does the redirect for me).

Could someone help me out here?

Be Heard!

I want to hear what you have to say! Share your comments and questions below.

Feeds & Profiles

Sponsors

Tutorials & Topics

Script & Style Tweets