free redirect URL. are they search engine friendly ?

[grich]

you know what i mean............free short url like http://xxx.to/yourname

do search engines respect these URLs ?

[aspen]

possibly - but better to err on the side of caution.

They definitely won't if the redirect spawns a popup or other ad first. If its a completely invisible server side redirect that is done correctly (there are different ways to do them) then it shouldn't matter.

I assume you dont have your own domain name. If you're serious about promoting your website you need one.

[hbird64]

We (as a directory) don't like the xxx.to redirects, mostly because of the popups. Mostly I change the short url in the original url. I like the cjb.net redirects better. We allow those because there are no popups and the cjb.net url often stays when the user decides to go to another free host.

Hugo

[freakysid]

Yeah, you have to remember that free url redirection services mainly used "cloaked" redirection too, which means using a frameset.

I try and help out the search engine with the cloaked redirection we do at neaturl.com by using noframe tags which include the title (as an h1) and description that the member provides when they set up their account and a link to the real page url.

I really don't know how well Google treats these type of redirect. I think, as always incoming links are the key. I have some members who have a very small pagerank for their redirect url (not many because most of them are running homepages and don't know the first thing about reciprocal linking and SEO).

Other search engiens do seem to index the redirect urls more. Such as fast, I think from memory.

I am sure that if I set up a directory with links to all my member's urls that would help. Something that has been on the to-do list for a while

[Archbob]

But URL redirection usually hurts because the redirection page does not have a description of your site.