Advanced Skills‎ > ‎

URL Redirection

What does it do?

URL redirection (a.k.a. page redirection) is used to take a visitor of one page (URL) to a different page.  This is helpful when content that had previously been published in one place has been moved to a new location.

Consider that you initially published some popular content within your site, and other sites have links connecting to your page. Over time your popular topic expanded, so you developed a dedicated website to host the information, now you want the pages (URLs) on the original site to redirect visitors to pertinent pages on the new site.

Page redirection can be setup within the webpage or by adjusting DNS setting in your domain registrar account.  
  • These instructions pertain to setting up page redirection in a Google Site page to go to another page.

Setup

Page redirection is accomplished using a gadget.

At the initial Google Site, go to the page you want to redirect away from.
  1. Enter edit mode
  2. Go to the point on the page where you want to insert the redirection gadget
  3. Insert the gadget using:  Insert -> Gadgets -> More gadgets,  select Public, search on "URL Redirector" and select "URL Redirector Modified"
  4. Enter the destination URL (http://...)
  5. Adjust other parameters - It's recommended that the redirection is delayed by several seconds (this will allow site editor(s) to re-edit this page in the future).
  6. Save page and test.
Note: a recent review of the gadget library revealed these 3 gadgets:
  • URL Redirector Modified  - by hosting.gmodules.com - displays the countdown - Recommended  since this gadget allows you to view the entire script source code (good transparency)
  • URL Redirector - by chaohan - displays the countdown (references scripts hosted elsewhere)
  • Amazing URL Redirector - by Jeremy Zhang works - displays the URL and countdown (references scripts hosted elsewhere)

View Example

This link opens a page that performs a URL redirect from this site to another site.