URL redirection for next page?

Question

I have a website with over 100 pages. We need to go with products that will be available soon, however many pages of the site will not be prepared at the time of release.

To move forward, I’d like to link to the “coming soon” page with links to current and accessible pages.

Is there an easy way to redirect the url to the Coming Soon page? Is this really, or is there a better way?

Found at: http://www.web-source.net/html_redirect.htm

"Put the following HTML redirect code between the tags and tags in your HTML code.

meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html" 

Does this negatively affect you if search engines crawl your site?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The code you specify will work. However, I would never do this:

• You can simply show the page you want to show immediately, without redirecting. This will be faster for the visitor, since they do not need to load two pages.
• If you should use redirection, why not create it programmatically, for example by pointing a web server (like Apache) to redirect certain pages?
• I would not link to pages that do not yet exist. Most visitors will not like this - clicking on something to learn “come back later” is a disappointment. We have all seen those coming soon, with content that never arrives, or only after a few months or even years. Either leave these links (or perhaps put the “work in progress” sign without a link), or add elements only after they are complete.

Search engines should work well with redirect pages, although it is unlikely that your page "will appear soon" will be displayed anywhere in the ranking ranking.

Answer 2

Perhaps the best or “more correct way” is to do the header level redirection. Using PHP, you would call

 <?php header("Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html"); 

There are also ways to do this in Apache (if you use it) and .htaccess -files. Read more at http://www.webweaver.nu/html-tips/web-redirection.shtml .