Search engine submission tactics

I need to get a client's site listed in the major search engines.

I don't know that much about the ins and outs of getting listed. I've heard that using a meta Refresh tag will get your submission ignored by many search engines. What I want to know is if an HTTP redirection on the page I submit will get my submission rejected. That's the question in a nutshell. If you want more details read the rest, otherwise skip to the last paragraph.

The page that I want to get listed is a homepage for a large sub-section of my client's site. What I want to do is submit a page to the search engines that has a short, easy address that I won't need to change, and have that page do an HTTP redirect (using HTTP headers) to the page with the content. This would allow me to organize the pages and files with the actual content however I want. Then I would be free to change the organization of directories and files without breaking the URL that I had submitted to the search engines, and provide an easy address for users to type in.

For example:
The URL of the actual page that I want users to reach from the search engine listing would be something like:

http://www.example.com/inside/events/annual/2003/

I would like to create a page at the address

http://www.example.com/annual/

that would HTTP redirect to the first URL.

As you can see, the redirection is within the same domain and what I am trying to do is completely legitimate -- I just want to make sure my submission doesn't fail based on a technicality. The page that I want the user to get to is for a conference that my client holds annually, so next year I will put a page at

http://www.example.com/inside/events/annual/2004/

, then I could just change the URL that the HTTP redirection points to and the original submission to the search engines would still work and because the same listing would be in there year after year it would probably move up in the ratings and get better placement.

Any information on what affects this might have, particularly if it will fail to get the page listed, would be appreciated.

Do search engine spiders recognize/follow redirects?

I guess that's what I'm wondering. You could certainly write the software to recognize different response codes and react accordingly.

Well, this doesn't answer the question, but it might obviate it. Rather than send a redirect can you just include the appropriate page?

So http://www.example.com/annual/ just includes http://www.example.com/inside/events/annual/2003/ or http://www.example.com/inside/events/annual/2004/, depending on the year? Then it wouldn't matter.

Well, it's something to consider. I mean, yes, technically I could include it with ColdFusion. That wouldn't be quite as straightforward as what I want to do; I'd have to change my relative links, for example. It would also be semantically different from what I want to accomplish and I'd like to preserve the semantics if possible. It's a sufficiently unattractive solution (for me) that I'll wait and see what the answer to the original question is before I really consider it, but I do appreciate the suggestion and your taking the time to actually understand my situation.

The thing that concerns me is a statement like this:


In the Open Directory submission instructions.