My Internet Redirects to Other Pages when Searching on the Internet

Search Engines

Redirects are particularly necessary for search-engine results. Getting at least an appearance on the first page of search results is like gold to an e-business. Once they have achieved a high-rank advantage, websites don't want to lose it by moving the target page. Sometimes, however, circumstances dictate that a page must move. Without redirects, clicking on a link from a search result to a moved page would result in a "page not found" message, which is annoying both for the surfer and for the website owner. The redirect will forward the visitor to the new address of the page without the visitor having to do anything.

Sometimes companies change their names, either because research shows the old name was off-putting or because the company was taken over by or merged with another company. Businesses want their website name to match their company or trading name. If the company name changes, the website name has to change. A page might move from one location on a website to another. Maybe a company reorganizes its product range and moves one product from one group to another. If the menu structure of the site leads the visitor through a products menu to product ranges and then on to individual products, the location of that product page would have to move.

Websites often have several addresses. To prevent a rival buying a similar name, the site owners have to cover every alternative domain to their home site. The owners of "www.funstuff.com"also need to control the .net, .org, .tv, .it, .co.uk versions of the name. Misspelling, or alternative punctuation also needs to be covered and so the site would need all the versions of "fun-stuff," "fundstuff," "funstuf," etc. By this method, a company soon ends up with a large number of web domains, but does not want to maintain a copy of the entire site for each. The solution is to maintain one website at the primary address and redirect all visitors to the secondary websites to the authoritative address.

A website may have a complicated structure with many directories and sub-directories. Pages generated dynamically often need parameters, and so the resulting URL can be very long. Simplifying the URL that appears in a search result can help the visitor identify the purpose of the page. So a fake address gets redirected to the real address.