How to show a 'We are now...' message for a rebrand and do a 301 redirect?

[Pawngo]

Our developer wants to use javascript, document referral or adding a URL parameter, in order to show a modal window telling them 'We are now...'.  A cookie seems to be too much work.  All of which don't play nice with the search engines.

Do you know of a technique or method that allows us to be SEO friendly and still give a good user experience?  Thanks.

[CodyWheeler]

Could you just handle this on the end state page - i.e. where the redirect points?

Welcome to example.com, formerly example2.com - etc.

[Pawngo]

Right.  The message would be on the final page.

It would look something like this:

crawler/human visits domain A --> 301 redirect --> domain B (message)

Human sees message. Hurray!

The problem is creating a 301 redirect and being able to show the message.

[bateman_ap]

One way to do it would be to redirect using a hash tag # as part of the redirect, now, these are not seen as a seperate page in the way a querystring might be, but a server won't usually pick up that it has the hash tag, they are client side only.

However you could use a bit of jQuery that looks for a hash value on pageload, and if it identifies one, spawns a modal saying "welcome to abc.com, we used to be zyx.com", I have used a plugin called jQuery BBQ for this: http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/

So for example, if using PHP you could using the following to redirect:

header("Location: http://www.example.com/#newdomain=1");

Then in your new site test for newdomain in jQuery BBQ using:

jQuery.bbq.getState("newdomain");

and if found spawn a modal.

[Pawngo]

Thanks Charles.  We'll try that.