PHP header redirect 301 - what are the implications

Question

I have domain com  If the user is logged in  it should load automatically domain com option-X where X is a predefined choice of the user   So  I do this at the top of index php   header  Location   option-X       But  if the user is not logged in  I just choose automatically the first option like this   header  HTTP 1 1 301 Moved Permanently     header  Location   option-a       So  i have two questions regarding the implications of doing so    Since the search engines crawlers won t be logged in  they will always get domain com option-a - does it affect them that it has a 301 header  What could be the server cpu load of doing those redirects  I don t know how to make a test out of it  The current site  which has no redirects  has about 100k daily visits

User · Accepted Answer

The effect of the 301 would be that the search engines will index /option-a instead of /option-x. Which is probably a good thing since /option-x is not reachable for the search index and thus could have a positive effect on the index. Only if you use this wisely ;-)

After the redirect put exit(); to stop the rest of the script to execute

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
header("Location: /option-a"); 
exit();

User · Answer

Just a tip  using http response code is much easier to remember than writing the full header   http response code 301   header  Location   option-a     exit

User · Answer

Make sure you die   after your redirection  and make sure you do your redirect AS SOON AS POSSIBLE while your script executes  It makes sure that no more database queries  if some  are not wasted for nothing  That s the one tip I can give you  For search engines  301 is the best response code

User · Answer

Search engines like 301 redirects better than a 404 or some other type of client side redirect  no worries there   CPU usage will be minimal  if you want to save even more cycles you could try and handle the redirect in apache using htaccess  then php won t even have to get involved   If you want to load test a server  you can use ab which comes with apache  or httperf if you are looking for a more robust testing tool

User · Answer

This is better    lt  php     Permanently redirect page header  Location  new page php  TRUE 301     gt    Just one call including code 301   Also notice the relative path to the file in the same directory  not   dir dir new page php   etc    which all modern browsers seem to support   I think this is valid since PHP 5 1 2  possibly earlier

[php] PHP header redirect 301 - what are the implications?

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