One of the worst things that can happen to your site is to have an Internet user try to locate it through the use of the search engines and they encounter a “page not found” or a “404″ error screen, simply because you changed the content or moved the page and you forgot to provide a way for your them to find what they were looking for.
This can be disastrous for your business as well as your website rankings. Keep in mind that it is very easy for people to click away and go to another, more accessible and easier to find website.
One way that you can actually prevent this from happening is by providing them with a 301 redirect that will basically lead them to the location of your new URL even if they try to access your old URL that they found on search engines.
What is a 301 Redirect?
Before anything else, we first need to discuss what a 301 redirect is in order for you to get a better idea as to what steps you need to take for the entire process.
A 301 redirect, or a permanent URL move, is actually the most efficient, and the only acceptable means of redirecting URLs or web pages from a search engine standpoint. Using other types of redirecting can get you in trouble with most search engines, so if you want to preserve your search
engine rankings, make sure to use this type of redirect if you are planning to move pages or content on your site.
When do you need to use a 301 Redirect?
When you decide to retire an old page, change a link or folder name, or you just need to move page positions around on your server. That is the time that you should use a 301 redirect since it will help you preserve your site’s page ranking in search engines. Using the 301 redirect basically
lets the search engines know that all links currently on the web will now belong to a new web page.
This is also a great tool if you want to consolidate websites and avoid duplication. It can also be useful when you have affiliate sites linked to your home page’s unique URL since you will be able to let the search engine spiders know that these affiliate sites are actually the same page.
This can actually benefit your site’s search engine page rankings since you get credited for the other affiliated links to your site, while preventing the search engine robots from indexing them, creating duplicate contents in its database.
Another good place to use this type of redirect is if you have purchased or shut down another website that is still receiving traffic. You can simply use the 301 redirect to get all of the traffic going to the other site redirected to your main site instead.
You can actually achieve the same type of redirecting process using other types of redirects, such as a 302 redirect, Java script redirect, or a meta refresh. These will be able to redirect traffic to your site just like ab 301 redirect, but only the 301 redirect will inform the search engines that the other sites actually belong to you, thereby avoiding any problems that may arise later on, such as getting flagged for having duplicate content.
There are a number of ways that you can use the 301 redirect, depending on what you need to redirect and where you need it to go. The most common type is to redirect your old URL to a new one. To do this all you have to do is go to the control panel of your web host, and select the
“redirect” option from there. Then fill in the blanks with the necessary information and select the “permanent” redirect option to activate the 301 redirect.
