Redirect Website - Building Your Own Website

With redirection, when a visitor types in your URL they are immediately transferred to the alternative website. For example, they type in abc.com but are shown def.com. When this takes place, there can be the option to either leave the entered URL in the address bar or show the real URL.

Which is best? It depends on what you want people to see. If it's as simple as you are redirecting from abc.co.uk to abc.com and don't mind people seeing the real URL, then show them the real URL. That way, if they bookmark, email links or whatever, they are using the real URL and this gets more traffic to the main site.

But if you are redirecting from abc.com to abc.myfreehost.com, then you might prefer them not to know the real URL. In that case you would choose not to show the URL after the redirect.

Redirection, when done properly, will be followed by the search engines, but this may lead them to listing the target URL, not the URL you are getting your visitors to type in.

Redirection can also take place through code (PHP, Javascript etc), but this is not really to do with hosting. For example, CompareMortgageRates.co.uk uses this to control where links lead to. There are various links throughout the site for which the supplier changes. They all point to a page that redirects to the current chosen supplier. This sort of redirection tends to stop search engines following the links and there is a theory that having some types of redirection on a page is enough to stop them listing that page. But no doubt we'll come back to this at a later date!