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How to create a delayed 301 redirect that still passes juice?
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My company is merging one of our sites into another site. At first I was just going to create a 301 redirect from domainA.com to domainB.com but we decided that would be too confusing for customers expecting to see domainA.com so we want to create a page that says something like "We've moved. please visit domainB.com or be redirected after 10 seconds".
My question is, how do I create a redirect that has a delay and will this still pass the same amount of juice that a regular 301 redirect would? I've heard that meta refreshes are considered spammy by Google.
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Google "strongly" suggests not using and/or removing meta refresh tags:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022447.htmlAlthough they may pass some juice, it's not nearly as effective as a 301, especially for a site migration. In my experience, a page that tells visitors they will soon be redirected risks high bounce rates and abandonment.
Really like Zachary's suggestion. A brief message, based on referrer data (Zachary may be able to help with this) seems to be the way to go, and safely delivers your visitors where they need to be.
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You can implement a meta refresh as follows:
This will delay the redirect to domainB.com by 10 seconds. It will pass some link juice but not much. It is not best practice to do this because, as you rightly state, Google does not like this type of redirect (due to spam abuse) and the loss of link juice.
I would suggest you just 301 redirect to new site and run a 'welcome to our new site' page on the new domain for the first few weeks while people adjust. You'd be surprised how quickly people adjust to new sites.
Adam.
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Perhaps the better solution is to check referrer data in the header of your new domain, and show a brief note at the top of the page if it's from your prior domain. This has the benefit of not annoying your visitors with a wait time (a big deal) and you don't have to count on a workaround being fine with Google.
Simple to do in any web language, let me know if you need help.
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