Magento Controllers: Redirecting to External URLs
Just a quick one. If you need to redirect to a URL outside of your regular Magento Base then its no use using:
$this->_redirect($path)
..instead use:
$this->_redirectUrl($url)
The only time to use the _redirect variant would be to redirect to an internal module/controller/action/param1/param1value page, where as _redirectUrl is geared towards your external URLs.
Back to work!