How do I redirect from homepage?

[JohnDoe1337]

Hi,

I have a WP blog with the homepage being SEO optimized (nonsense content) and I want to know how I can redirect automatically to a different part of my blog. I have searched a lot for a guide on this forum on how to do this but found nothing. I installed the gocodes wp plugin but apparantly that's only for affiliate link cloaking since you cannot redirect the homepage...

 

[balsagoth007]

There's so many redirect plugins in WP.
ex:Simple 301 Redirects

 

[JohnDoe1337]

There's so many redirect plugins in WP.
ex:Simple 301 Redirects

Won't the google crawler see this and take into account the page that is redirected to?

 

[unique1]

wordpress. org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/ may be this can help you remove spaces between link and try it with your Wordpress blog

 

[JohnDoe1337]

wordpress. org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/ may be this can help you remove spaces between link and try it with your Wordpress blog

But you haven't answered my google question yet

 

[Autumn]

What you're talking about doing is a basic form of cloaking. Yes, it can / will get you in trouble eventually. You have to decide on exactly what traffic you want to redirect off your home page and how you are going to differentiate bots from browsers.

A simple php example that shows googlebot your homepage but redirects all other traffic to your alternative page is:

<?php

if(preg_match('/google/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
	// show regular content below
} else {
	header('Location: http://yourdomain.com/some-other-page/', true, 301);
	exit;
}

?>

<!-- Regular homepage html goes here -->

 

[hugh14]

These replies so far have been useless, or even dangerous.

You are talking about content cloaking, not just redirection. You're right, if you just 301 then your carefully SEO'd home page will be ignored. You are talking about showing one thing to G and another to your real visitors. That will get your site penalized or deindexed if you use the code that someone posted above.

What you need is a very secure cloaker which catches all search engine bots and manual reviewers. Typically cloakers just try to filter out bots using the user's user-agent and/or by comparing their ip address to a known database. But there are several other layers of security you need as well.

 

[hugh14]

An elite member with almost 2k posts and over 2k thank yous. Why would you give the OP code that was going to get her site destroyed in the SERPs? His rankings would last less than a week with that code.

What you're talking about doing is a basic form of cloaking. Yes, it can / will get you in trouble eventually. You have to decide on exactly what traffic you want to redirect off your home page and how you are going to differentiate bots from browsers.

A simple php example that shows googlebot your homepage but redirects all other traffic to your alternative page is:

... dangerous code omitted ...

 

[firstlady0524]

I have no idea how cloaking works at all but hopefully reading these threads I can teach myself

 

[Autumn]

An elite member with almost 2k posts and over 2k thank yous. Why would you give the OP code that was going to get her site destroyed in the SERPs? His rankings would last less than a week with that code.

Why don't you shut the fuck up? Obviously I gave that as an example and no, simple UA cloaking won't get you banned within a week on a low key site. No one's going to give out full cloaking scripts on BHW.

Can't help but notice that you're pumping your own elite service with a mere 18 spots still open. Newsflash, all the good custom code gets shared on private boards and IMs between people who trust each other... Not who trawl message boards trying to drum up business.

10 years of IM experience has shown me that, in general, most people who talk about "we" are really just some guy in his basement and a quick skim of your other posts tells me that you like to repeat what you've been reading on message boards, not what you've learned from your own experience.

You need 50 people to buy Shadowmaker? You obviously don't have much of an income then. Have fun with your 32 imaginary friends.

Fuck off with your 15 posts you worthless piece of low life trash.

 

[JohnDoe1337]

Why don't you shut the fuck up? Obviously I gave that as an example and no, simple UA cloaking won't get you banned within a week on a low key site. No one's going to give out full cloaking scripts on BHW.

Can't help but notice that you're pumping your own elite service with a mere 18 spots still open. Newsflash, all the good custom code gets shared on private boards and IMs between people who trust each other... Not who trawl message boards trying to drum up business.

10 years of IM experience has shown me that, in general, most people who talk about "we" are really just some guy in his basement and a quick skim of your other posts tells me that you like to repeat what you've been reading on message boards, not what you've learned from your own experience.

You need 50 people to buy Shadowmaker? You obviously don't have much of an income then. Have fun with your 32 imaginary friends.

Fuck off with your 15 posts you worthless piece of low life trash.

I would like to add that I got "invited" into his group (after I joined, the website still said "18 open spots"...). It turns out you have to pay 200$ a month to be part of this "exclusive" group. Turns out it's just a pyramid scheme since you can reduce that price by referring more people.... So yea, don't trust this guy.

 

[hugh14]

So let's get this straight. Autumn posts some code that will get you de-indexed if you use it. I call her on it. I mention that I am starting a group to do stuff like this right. Autumn flames me because I hurt her little feelings I guess. OP flames me because he wanted to get something for nothing.

Autumn, if someone asks for a way to do something, and you give them code that will do it but kill their site and don't explicitly state that it is just an example and NOT to use it you are being dangerous. You might have meant it as an example but don't expect people to be able to read your mind, as short a read as that might be. How the heck did someone like you get to be a moderator here?

John, seriously! You didn't join the group, you just joined the email list to get access to the invitation. Then you clearly read the invitation which does require a contribution from each member (but not $200 like you said). Also, since when does an affiliate commission make something a pyramid scheme?

Lastly, this has nothing to do with a group buy of Shadowmaker. I have indeed collected a small group (up to 33 now) willing to chip in on a coder. Once we get up to 50 we will then try to recruit exactly 150 more at a higher rate so that the first 50 people can pay even less. That's it - the group never gets beyond 200 tops. Does that really sound like a pyramid scheme? Join, get access to tools and our own coder, get a commission for referring others - pretty standard fair in this industry isn't it?

Now you guys can rant all you want. I've corrected the misrepresentations that you have made and I'll leave it at that.

 

[Autumn]

Does that really sound like a pyramid scheme? Join, get access to tools and our own coder, get a commission for referring others - pretty standard fair in this industry isn't it?

Sound like some scammy bullshit to me. Anyone who is an active cloaker knows that the actual code for cloaking is drop dead simple - say 20-50 lines max of actual code for a typical script. The hard bit is not the actual coding, which can be done by any old noob, but deciding on heuristics for what combination of actual conditions you want to cloak for - IP? UA? referrer? cookies? js? different browser headers? etc.

The coding is cheap but the decision making is hard and requires some thinking and some existing SEO skills. It certainly doesn't take 50 or 200 people to buy a cloaking script - it takes one person with a knowledge of how bots and browsers work and the HTTP protocol, and maybe $100 if they need to pay a coder to actually write up the script that they want.

Also the other part of a cloaking script is the retrieval of your content, which varies according your particular data storage method (SQL or flat text files?) and CMS (eg. WP or Drupal or custom CMS?). If you are taking the "mosaic" cloaking approach then you are serving different versions of the same page to different browsers, requiring even more storage finesse. That is obviously not a one-size-fits-all solution and the storage part needs to be customized for each user's particular application.

Lastly I would add that there is no such thing as a "super secure" cloaking mechanism. No matter what scheme you use, there are always tradeoffs that mean that someone (either the bots or the real users, depending on your method) can bust your cloak wide open if they are so inclined. A simple example is that you can make a cloaking script secure from regular users by using a spider IP list and only cloaking by IP. It's impossible to fake an IP and get any data back, so regular users are effectively completely barred from seeing your spider content. However, that means that all the SE spiders have to do is come from an IP that's not on your list, and they can easily see the content you're serving to regular users. Steps you might take to moderate this risk then mean that it's easier for regular users to get at your spider content. In some ways cloaking is ultimately a no-win situation with no "best" solution and you just have to decide what you want your risk profile to be.

Anyone who claims that totally secure cloaking is possible is probably an inexperienced noob who is trying to talk himself up, or a lying schemer with a commercial incentive to get your money.