Have you ever bookmarked a website page, forgot about it, and then tried to visit it again months later only to find that the link no longer works? It’s likely that you ran into a problem because the owner of the website changed domain names, but failed to use a 301 redirect to make sure you ended up in the right place. Avoid this causing this confusion on your own site by understanding what a 301 redirect is and when to use it.
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one website domain to another. You’ve probably experienced a 301 redirect without even realizing it, because these redirects are the reason both http://website.com and http://www.website.com bring you to the same place, even though those could be considered different websites.
301 redirects are extremely important for making sure your site visitors always get where they’re trying to go, even when you change domain names. It’s also important for your search engine optimization (SEO). Some examples of when you need a 301 redirect:
You might think it’s more effort than it’s worth to redirect every single page of your old website to your new one, especially if you feel the likelihood that anyone would have links to your old pages is slim. However, even if you don’t care about possibly losing some visitors, redirects are very important for your search engine rankings.
Even if you didn’t do anything to encourage it, your old URL was working very hard to rise up in the ranks of search engines. If you fail to use 301 redirects, all of that hard work will have been for nothing and you will start all over, because Google will have no way to know that your new domain is the same as your old one.
301 redirects serve to tell search engine bots that they should be indexing your new URL as if it were your old one, retaining the ranking power of your previous domain.
One final note: You only want to use 301 redirects if you are planning to use this redirect permanently. If you’re going to revert it back to the original at some point, use a 302 redirect, which is a temporary redirect.
The first step in conducting a 301 redirect is to determine which pages need to be equated to each other. We like to use the tool Screaming Frog to index all of our existing pages, then find their equivalent in the new site manually.
The next step is to apply the redirects. Most of the time, 301 redirects are conducted using code, and this article on redirection by Moz explains how to do that in detail.
At Insivia, we use WordPress as our content management system (CMS), so we installed this plugin to eliminate the need for code and make redirecting a large volume of pages at once easy.
301 Redirects are an important, but often overlooked part of having good SEO. Don’t make the mistake of dismissing them as unimportant, or you might find yourself at the bottom of the search engine totem pole when you should be at the top.
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