How and why 301 redirect your URL’s?

What is a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect is a very useful technique, and is the solution to a lot of problems that can have a hugely negative impact on your site's SEO. For instance, if you change the domain of a particular page on your site, you are at risk of:

1)       Upsetting your customers – they will come across a 404 error page not found message when they visit your site

2)       Upsetting search engines – if the search engine bots crawl a page on your site that technically no longer exists, you'll see a drop in rankings and therefore a decrease in traffic and enquiries.

301 redirects are the solution to these potential problems. A 301 redirect is a HTTP status code for permanent redirect; this basically tells the search engines that the page has moved to a new address.

For example, if a page URL changed from www.i-com.net/search-engine-optimisation.html to www.i-com.net/seo.html to make the URL shorter and more search engine friendly, you would install a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This means that if someone types in your old URL (or clicks on a leftover link to your old URL), they will automatically be sent to your new URL.

Why redirect a URL?

• It's the most spider and visitor-friendly strategy around for web sites implementing URL changes
• Cuts down duplicate content issue
• Helps to transfer link juice and page rankings
• You won't lose website traffic, unless the old URL is redirected to an irrelevant page

How do I Redirect a URL?

In order to perform 301 redirects, you'll need ftp access to the root of your site; you'll then need to open the .htaccess file and edit the code.

Redirect the non-WWW. version to WWW.

It is important that you redirect the non-www. version of your site to the www. version, otherwise Google will see http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com as two separate domains, and all the inbound links that point to http://mysite.com won't automatically pass authority over to http://www.mysite.com/, and vice versa.

The code below will redirect the non www. versions to www. by replacing the URL

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect an old page to a new page

If you already have a .htaccess file and want to redirect an old page to a new location, use the code below and replace the file names.

 RewriteRule ^search-engine-optimisation.html$ /seo.html [R=301,NC,L]

Redirect .htm pages to .php pages

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php

Tip

To fix any 404 errors in webmaster tools simply follow the same 301 redirects guidelines and redirect the old page that no longer exists to a similar page in the .htaccess sheet, then use Google Webmaster Tools to mark the 404 errors as fixed. You can test if the redirect has been successful by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location.