Redirection and the googlebot : a newbie question

Question

Ok suppose I have some content

My site !! Usefull Info here about grazillas!

in a htm-file, that can be reached with a url that can change at any time, like

url1 : http://www.mysite.com/notfixed.htm?($!abcd)/bs/@id=12

but I have a fixed url that always will be pointing to url1, even if it changes like

url 2 : http://www.mysite.com/redirection.htm?pageId=12

so when I google on 'grazillas' I would like to get

---

G O O G L E

• http://www.mysite.com/redirection.htm?pageId=12
  • --> Site with usefulll info about grazilla's

---

and NOT :

---

G O O G L E

• http://www.mysite.com/notfixed.htm?($!abcd)/bs/@id=12
  • --> Site with usefulll info about grazilla's

---

Is this the way google behaves, or is there any way to achieve this? Is this boiling down to indexing permalinks?

Answer 1

I can think of a few ways you can achieve this.

1. 301 Redirect

You set up url1 to do a 301 redirect to url2. This would mean that Google goes to url1 and is redirected to url2 and would therefore index url2.

2. Robots.txt

You can use robots.txt to blog Google from indexing the notfixed.htm page. Something like this would work:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /notfixed.htm

3. Canonical

With Google you can use a special field in the document called canonical which basically tells google that the link it is checking has another version at this page and that Google should favour that page instead of the one it is currently on. You would do this by putting the following on the page url1

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/redirection.htm?pageId=12" />

For more information on this topic, see this page.