Does an internal redirect = ban from SE?

[makemusic]

My apologies if this quesiton has been asked a thousand times but I couldn't find it by searching.......

My home page sits within a sub-directory of my root, but my host says I have to have a file called 'index' at the root. Rather than recreating my home page and shifting it around etc etc I thought an immediate redirect to the relevant sub-dir should do the trick.

Does Google and the like still ban for internal redirects?

 

[ChrisHirst]

There has never been automatic bans for redirects. There have been bannings/penalties for using deceptive redirects and temporary penalties for getting the redirects coded incorrectly or badly set up. To get an all out total ban you need to be blatanly abusing the SEs.

It all depends on how you redirect. Server-Side 301s are prefered, but meta refreshes are being handled differently now according to reports from the Chicago SES.

Article from Ron Carnell on the event VirtualPromote

A to B, with a 302 (Moved Temporarily) response code : Page B will be added to the index, but the URL will be listed as A and all link credit will remain with A.

A/ to B/deep, with a 301 (Moved Permanently) response code : In this instance, we're talking about redirecting a home page to a deeper page, as so often seems to happen when a "home page" default ends up being a CGI script in some other folder. Strangely, in my opinion, Yahoo has decided to treat this exactly as they treat a 302. The home page URL will be listed in the SERPs, but the deeper linked page's content will be indexed.

A to B, with a 301 (Moved Permanently) response code : Page A will be dropped entirely from the index, and page B will be added in its place. All links and anchor text attributed to page A will be credited to page B.

A meta-refresh, coded directly in the page, can now take the place of a server-side redirect. Considering how badly meta-refreshes have been abused by spammer in the past, this is surprising news. But it's also good news, especially for the many webmasters who don't have access to server level redirects. A meta-refresh of 1 second or less will be treated as a 301, while anything longer than 1 second will be considered a 302.

Using javascript will still be viewed as dubious though and will get checked out if reported.

Chris.

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[makemusic]

Thanks for this, Chris. Panic over. Interesting about the meta-refresh.....will look into to see if this is confirmed and absolute.