Since this is a very important part of effective search engine optimization, I have decided to do a short three-part series on Redirects. The first part in this series is 301.
Before I explain all the different ways to AND not to redirect, I am first going to explain why this is so important to SEO and the search engines.
Reasons to 301 Redirect:
- Canonical URLs – Matt Cutts gives a good explanation as why it is always a good idea to use a 301 redirect to specify which of www or non-www you prefer to use at your website. Avoids duplicate content issues aka Webspam.
- Domain Name Change – best way to transfer PageRank from one domain to another. I have heard from many sources that this does NOT work, however I, myself, recently changed domain names for one of my sites, used 301 to redirect viewers (and spiders) to my new site and it worked like a charm. Just be sure that you try to change your URL with those that are linking to your site. If you don’t, then you will lose those backlinks once to take the old site down for good.
- If you are like me, then you REALLY want to use your keywords in your url of your pages. Sometimes this means renaming the files. For example: www.example.com/webdesign.htm to www.example.com/web-design-solutions.htm . If you do this, just make sure you let everyone know by sending a 301 redirect server heading to the new page. Once again, try to let your linking partners know the new page so they can update the link.
There are definitely more circumstances in which you may want to use a 301 redirect, but if you have any doubts, just drop me a line and I’ll be glad to give you my best advise.
How to 301 Redirect:
If your website is hosted on an Apache web server, the best way to do this is by using a file called .htaccess and uploading it to the root folder of your website. If this is your case the simply open Notepad or any other text editor and simply use this command.
Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm http://www.domainname.com/newfile.htm
To 301 Redirect and entire website to a new website with the same file structure, use this statement in your .htaccess file
redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.olddomain.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com
To resolve the non-www and www issue you can use this in your .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at 404s.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
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