Meta Redirects in Actinic

A Meta refresh tag is normally used to tell the search engines that a particular page has moved.
Adding a meta redirect in the head of your document will redirect the page to the new location in a matter of milliseconds.

Many actinic systems use meta redirects for the dyanmic areas of the site, such as the best offers and latest products. A user is taken to a dynamic page in the cgi-bin area then meta redirected to the product page they were looking for.

For example a user might be taken to the following dynamic page

• http://www.websitename.com/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?PRODREF=127&NOLOGIN=1

then meta redirected to

• http://www.websitename.com/acatalog/product-name.html

But what is the problem….

The problem here is that meta redirects can be used as a spam technique, which could cause a ranking penalty in the search engines.

And how do you fix it….
To resolve the issue on actinic you will need access to the actinic system, which is held on the client side. There is no simple way to FTP to the system so you will probably need to install the software on your end. Once you have access to the system you will need to do one of the following:

• Link to the pages directly
• Change the redirects to 301 redirects

Paul
SEO Project Manager