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Here you use a regular expression to check if the URL ends with the aforementioned file names. You use

the

preg_match()

function, and instruct it to store any characters that precede the file name by placing

.*

within parentheses —

(.*)

. These characters, now stored in

$captures[1]

, will be the location you want

to redirect to.

If you have a match, you then perform the 301 redirect:

{

// perform a 301 redirect to the new URL

header(‘HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);

header(‘Location: ‘ . $captures[1]);

}

Other Types of Redirects

Although there are other types of redirects, such as meta refresh and JavaScript redirects, we do not

generally recommend their use. Spammers have historically abused them, and for this reason their use

is almost

always

suspect. It is recommended that a meta refresh is never used with a delay of less than

10 seconds. A typical meta refresh is illustrated here:

<!-- Redirect to SEO Egghead in 10 seconds -->

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”10;url=http://www.seoegghead.com/“>

We do not recommend using JavaScript-based redirects at all. If discovered, it will most likely result in

some sort of penalty.

Summary

This chapter has illustrated that a fundamental understanding of relevant HTTP status codes is vital to

the search engine marketer. Business decisions dictate that pages move, domains change, or that content

is removed. Informing the search engine of these decisions using these status codes can avert a very

costly “misunderstanding.”

94

Chapter 4: Content Relocation and HTTP Status Codes

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