I'm working with a hosting company. I need them to setup a 301 redirect for one of my pages. I really care about the ranking on the search engines for this particular page.
They claim that in order to do a 301 redirect, they will delete the page on their server which will trigger a 404 and they will respond with a 301 to the new address.
It is my understanding that you cannot do a 404 and a 301, but I'm just a programmer.
I'm not sure if they're using IIS. All I know is they specialize in ColdFusion hosting.
Thanks
Each HTTP request generates one HTTP response from the server. Each HTTP response has only one status code.
There is a setting in IIS where you can specify to do a permanent 301 redirect. In that case no check is made to see if any files that used to be in the website exists. So no 404 is generated.
If the end user is getting a 404 then there is no redirect at all. Google and any other search engine will not preserve your page rank for each page on your site.
This one kind of makes my brain hurt. I don't have the greatest knowledge on how Google handles things like this but logic would dictate this hosting company's method is a horrible, horrible idea.
It sounds like they want to set up the 301 redirect on the 404 page itself. So basically you go to your page and it returns a 404 since they deleted it, Page not Found, then that 404 page is 301 redirected to your new page. All this is going to do is tell Google that you have a new 404 page (which they don't care about), and that the page they were looking for, the one you want to maintain page rank for, no longer exists. The page rank would logically be destroyed.
In order to achieve the benefit you want from the 301, it has to be for the page in question, not the 404 page.