Any chance to redirect homepage to a changing permalink without irritating search engines?

Question

We have a php 5.3/Apache 2.2 based cartoon website that always shows the most current cartoon on the homepage (index.php).

Now, a lot of people want to link directly to that cartoon (by copying the URL), so we added a little permanent link below the image (changing with the image id, like cartoon_1234.htm, cartoon_1235.htm and so on).

However, quite a few still link to index.php without realizing that that will show a different cartoon every day.

We considered using a simple header redirect - header('location: cartoon_xxxx.htm') - in our php code) that redirects whenever index.php is called, thus showing the desired URL in the browser.

But we are afraid the for instance the Google algorithm will not like the constantly changing temporary redirect (or will it?). And we don't want to risk our good ranking by showing different content to people and to SE-bots.

Question: is there any recommended practice to implement this kind of homepage with permalinked URL?

Answer 1

Question: is there any recommended practice to implement this kind of homepage with permalinked URL?

You should let the homepage be the homepage and you should not add redirects.

Each time a robot wants to index your homepage, there would be a redirect to some new page (at least one new page each day).

This is not helpful for your ranking.

Instead, educate the users so they know if they want to bookmark a specific cartoon, what they need to do.

Generally you've got a logical problem here: You can not divide one URL into two. One for the search engine robots and one for your users.

Answer 2

There is one possible solution using the Javascript History API, which can change the URL in the address bar without redirecting or reloading the page. See the answer here for details:
Updating address bar with new URL without hash or reloading the page.