Hello,

I have a wordpress install and I am redirecting one of my sub folders to a google form, is a 301 the best way to do this?  I read that is for when a page permanently moves, but this is a fresh sub folder so it never really got indexed on my site anyway, last thing I want to do is hurt my SEO.

This is what I am using in the .htaccess within the subfolder itself.

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RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLDGd_SWT_ZqDe74Zzbyg5iKWLlvq6-6YFRgO3PQ/viewform?usp=sf_link/$1 [R=301,L]

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I’m confused.

What do you mean by subfolder?

Do you just want people to go to a google form when they click on something?

I refer to a subfolder as the area of address bar after the domain extension, for examples

www.google.com/games here the subfolder would be games, the redirect works as I have the .htaccess in that folder but I was wondering if a 301 redirect is the correct procedure.

Those aren't subfolders. They are just wordpress categories

If you are using a redirect for this you are doing it wrong and it will affect your SEO.

I have a google form I need my users to complete, and they will access it manually rather than clicking from my site (they will be given instructions in the post), I have a QR code that a mobile users can scan but for non mobile users I dont want them to manually have to type a google docs link in, its very long even the short version.  A redirect from www.mysite.com/survey with .htaceess to the google docs is very coinvent, if its bad for SEO what is the good way please?

OK, I get it now. If it works for you then that's great.

If www.mysite.com/survey is an orphan page then there is no SEO penalty. But if there is a link from anywhere on the site Google will get upset as this looks like a doorway or cloaking page.

 

I'd say 301 would be fine. As for big G if they know of or accidentally crawl the url then whatever they knew is now gone and the replacement is on Google Docs. If it's a fresh url then they didn't know about it anyway.

That is great to hear, I will implement it now I know it wont hurt SEO, the key suggestion being not to link to it from my own sitemap.

Why even have a sitemap?

If the site is indexed and ranked a sitemap is redundant.