Something I’ve overlooked for some time is the 301: Permanently moved HTTP/1.1 status code.
For quite some time now, Frosthold’s website has been operating from this URL after I bought the much easier to remeber frosthold.com, replacing the old No-IP address: frosthold.zapto.org. Upon doing this, I set up a nice user-friendly page saying “We Have Moved!” with a link to the new Frosthold website. The problem is, search engines didn’t pick up on this. It’s taken quite some time for people to update their links on their sites, many still point to the old site. This meant that people searching for Frosthold came to the #1 result first, always the old website. It’s taken even longer for frosthold.com to come second which I just Googled, and it is now second.
I then realised my mistake – for the search engines to know where my site has moved to, I need to tell them using a 301: Permanently Moved status code. So I simply wrote a very very quick PHP script containing this:
<? header("Location: http://www.frosthold.com/",TRUE,301); ?>
And hopefully in a month or two, frosthold.zapto.org should be gone from the search engine results, and frosthold.com shall reign supreme!
