Normally the best practice for 301/302 (permanent/temporary) redirects are through your web server. However, you can only do this if you own your own domain. So what happens when you’re using a free webpage service such as Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad, and you want to do 301 redirects to your new website?

If you’re thinking of doing Javascript redirects, this isn’t highly recommended as Google and Yahoo web crawlers won’t be able to follow the redirects, which will affect the destination’s ranking and indexing.

Although not the best, your next best bet is using the meta refresh tag to do your redirections. It seems that Google recognises meta redirects and Googlebot should be able to crawl to the new page, according to Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Yahoo’s Search Help also seems to recognise meta redirects and the crawler will be able to follow the redirects.

It appears that a meta refresh delay of 0 or 1 second will be considered as a 301 redirect and anything longer is considered a 302.

I will try to post a javascript solution that will be able to handle redirects from your old website to appropriate pages of your new website this weekend.

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