Login Page Redirection

[anantgarg]

Hello,

I have certain pages on my site which are login only. Am wondering if a user reaches that page, should I send him to a 301 redirect to a new login page? or some other form of redirection?

Any suggestions on how to best tackle this situation?

Update

If I redirect to a login.php page, then what kind of redirection should I use?

Thank you for your time,

Anant

[mattbeswick]

I'm guessing that you currently load the login form if the user isn't logged in onto the page without redirecting? If so, that's perfectly fine... all I'd do is add a 'noindex, follow' meta robots tag to those pages.

Others might think differently though - would be interested to hear if there're any benefits in redirecting to a central login page...

[anantgarg]

How do I add a noindex, follow code? Is it a HTML tag? should it be follow or nofollow?

[StephanM]

It's an HTML tag and should be placed in your

[StephanM]

Hmm, I meant to post my reply here instead as an answer but I can't seem to edit it anymore. Anyway, yes it's an HTML meta tag. See my other post.

[mattbeswick]

Stephan - Edit's been broken for a while - apparently a bug report was sent off to the SEOMoz dev team last week

Anant - Stephan's answer below is correct... I should've included that in my original answer but Monday morning laziness took over! One thing to remember - make sure you only add it to pages that require a login as you'll end up de-indexing a load of pages if you mess it up.

-Matt

[anantgarg]

Why "follow"? Why not "nofollow"?

[StephanM]

Follow/nofollow tells Google whether to follow the links on that page, regardless of whether it should index it.

Follow is usually safer, because even if it doesn't add the page to Google's index it at least alows Google to follow the links and pass some PageRank around. If a login form is all there is, nofollow would be no problem either, but it can never hurt to have Google follow the links to other sections of your website.

The only time I use nofollow in combination with noindex if it's a page that links out a lot (like the almost obligatory 'Friends' or similar linking pages). Those pages I don't want to index AND don't want to pass pagerank through. Anything else: just follow.