Redirecting Traffic

Over on Adesblog.com a couple of very useful tips - one about getting the most out of StumbleUpon traffic, the other about saving face when you sell a site - got me thinking about how I could make the most of visitors from specific websites.

Sciencebase gets a lot of traffic from a particular educational website in the US. That site links to the main Sciencebase homepage, which is not particularly tailored to science students. However, just this week, I created a portal-type page (inspired by a tip on Dosh Dosh) that provides links to science educational content on the site, such as chemistry homework help, science videos, and science fair project ideas. It would make sense for the visitors from the educational site to get to this page directly rather than losing themselves while navigating the rest of the site.

So, following the instructions on Adesblog.com, I created a piece of code that is simply pasted into the .htaccess file in the root of the Sciencebase server.

The code looks like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} referrerURL\.com/
RewriteRule ^$ www.redirectedURL.com [R=301,L]

The “RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} referrerURL\.com/” part detects whether visitors have arrived from a specific site (I switched the word “referrer” for the actual domain of the science education site). The result has been a significant increase in conversions on specific targets now featured on that landing page.

The next command “RewriteRule ^$ /specific-page.html [R=301,L]” then redirects only those visitors to the specific page, in this case I used “/learn-with-sciencebase.html”.

You hopefully get the picture (make sure you back up .htaccess before you make any changes) but let your imagination run wild. What specific pages would you like visitors from specific sites to see. You could present top new content to Diggers or Stumblers, for instance, as well as asking them kindly to Digg or Stumble you. If you have lots of traffic to your homepage from any given site, think about what those visitors might like to see most, create a new page, just for them, and use the redirect to send them straight to it.

If you plan to meddle with your .htaccess, please create a backup first. Once you’ve edited the file you can validate it here. The team there can also solve your problems for a fee, or you could come back here and leave a request for assistance in the comments.