I run a (small) news website which has also a forum in a subfolder of the root. I'm planning to give the site a facelift and a code restructuration, so I wanted to put some redirect on the home page that will point directly to forum's index (www.mysite.com --> www.mysite.com/forum) while I tinker with it. And that, given the little free time I have, will take no less than a couple of month. Being a news site I'm pretty sure that would affect it's overall ranking, but I need to do it, so:which is the best way to redirect? I pondered and read here and there about the different means, but I couldn't figure out which is worst for SEO.Do I use a 302 redirect or use Location:newurl in page headers using php? Or I just put a meta tag in the html page (or a javascript, what's better).Sorry but I'm not really into these things, I may have said something silly, I know...Thanks
Temporary website redirect: 3xx or php/meta?
seo;redirects;http headers
Do a 307 temporary redirect on the server side. You can do this with PHP or .htaccess, it doesn't matter which. But definitely make sure you send the 307 header as that is what tells the search engines the redirect is temporary and to try again later. Without it they will consider the pages removed which is exactly what you don't want.PHP:header('Location: /forum', true, 307);exit;