On Fri, 2014-10-03 at 10:03 -0700, Paul Heinlein wrote:
I've always assumed (without any data whatsoever on which to base that assumption) that scanbots won't follow redirects to different addresses. Do you have any information to the contrary?
If you mean by 'scanbot' a web crawler, then YES.
I recently moved a sub-domain web site on 1111.2222.com to 1111.3333.com and redirected traffic, including crawlers, with a simple:-
<VirtualHost 1111.2222.com:80> ............. ............... .......... <Directory /data/web/do/2222/1111/> RedirectMatch permanent ^/(.*)$ http://1111.3333.com/$1 </Directory> </VirtualHost>
and Google followed. So did other crawlers.
I have previously, and successfully, moved whole web sites to different domains and got the crawlers to follow by using the same method.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Paul. England, EU.