Display a message after 301 redirect.

[WilliamBay]

I know this one is a little more technical than pure SEO, but it somewhat ties in.

I'm redirecting 2 sites to one. The companies have combined, and I've imported all their content that has been created, and the url mapping is set up correctly.

So it currently is set up like this:

A.com --> C.com
A.com/blogpost-1 --> C.com/blogpost-1

B.com --> C.com B.com/blogpost-20 --> C.com/blogpost-20

What i would like is some method a redirect when landing at C.com or C.com/blogpost-XX.

And in turn display a message in a DIV so I can style it.

And yes, I have nothing better to do on a Friday night

[JoshPugh]

Hi William,

Shouldn't be too hard. In that 301 redirect, add a GET query.

i.e. A question mark after the URL in the redirect that says something like:

http://www.new-url.com?redirect=true

What this will mean is that on your NEW site, you can add a query like (if using PHP):

if(isset($_GET['redirect')){

if($_GET['redirect'] == 'true'){

?>

You were redirected!

}

}

Decoding this, it basically checks for a question mark in the url, and if it finds one, it adds the div with the class "redirected" and says something!

Let me know if that didn't make sense!

[JoshPugh]

P.S. Ensure that you have rel="canonical" on the new URL because otherwise you won't be getting proper SEO for the pages with the ?redirect=true

[WilliamBay]

Thanks for this! It wasn't working for me initially, and asked around. looks like you missed a "]" in the first line. So it should be:

if(isset($_GET['redirect'])){

I was able to get it to work at the root domain. A.com --> C.com

After getting this all sorted out though, I realize that I really wanted a pop up screen that could be closed, and that it would require me to spend even more time on it, and trying to add javascript as well. I decided to just scrap the idea.

Another problem I had was that the ?redirect=true at the end of the URL, messed up the direct linking to subpages and posts as well. So instead of :

C.com/blogpost-20 I would get C.com?redirect=true/blogpost-20.

Since there is no such page, it just returned the contents from the home page.

I appreciate your help though. It just seems like more effort that I want to put in, and probably more than the client wants to pay for.

[JoshPugh]

Ah sorry about missing the bracket.

Yeah the ? query has to come at the very end, otherwise it interrupts the flow of the URL... So it should be C.com/blogpost-20?redirect=true

There is lots you can do, but I understand that it may be a bit more work than you planned