301 Redirect: When to Use it and Why

They're more important than you might think and without them you can easily lose your Google ranking!

Ever hearded of a 301 Redirect? If not, do not worry, a lot of individuals haven't, but that definitely does not negate the significance of them. In fact, you could quickly lose your hard-earned Google ranking if you do not use them when and where needed.

Be Happy! Do a 301 Redirect and Keep Your Google Ranking.

Really??? Tell me more!

Ok, so what is a 301 redirect? Great question.

Seen by search engines as web page 'moved permanently', it redirects any type of old URL address to the brand-new one you developed in its place, and as a result makes for HAPPY Search Engines and happy internet site owners!

Frequently, sites are created utilizing poor practice SEO or no SEO at all. When the owner of the site realizes it, be it yourself or your customer, one of the most vital things that needs to be done is add your pages optimal keyword phrase to the URLs of the each web page of the entire site.

Ok, so far so good, tell me more: Well say, you or your client has had their internet site for some time, and Google has indexed some of their web pages even though poor SEO was implemented (of course, it will not be too many if there is no SEO on the internet site), so you attempt to help their website move up the search engine rankings by analyzing keyword phrases and determining which are the best fit.

You have the very best of intentions. You begin by changing the URLs from the poorly named web addresses, for example: www.example.com/page1 to www.example.com/black-cotton-shorts-for-men (assuming this is a page where you are selling black cotton shorts for men).

Your client seems very happy with what you've done. She decides to Google herself using her normal keywords searches she knows she ranks for, and there she is as normal. She clicks on the link and then BAM- it's a 404 'OOPS, page not found here!' You're client is confused and horrified! Where is her webpage? And what happened?

What happened is this: Google doesn’t realize that you changed the name of your URL and still has your old URL indexed, but your old URL is now GONE – changed to the new SEO friendly URL address. Soon, the Google crawlers will realize you old website address no longer exists for that page and will remove it from the index completely as Google doesn’t want a bunch of non-existing pages taking up space on their search engine. Your new URL will have to make its way through the search engine ranking process all over again which, as a lot of us know, can be a long and frustrating process – sometimes evoking REAL TEARS!!!

Still confused?

The bottom line is this, if you need to alter the URL of a web page as it is shown in search engine results, Google recommends that you utilize a server-side 301 redirect. This assists to direct both users and search engines to the correct web page (the new URL).

Taken right from Google Webmaster Tools regarding 301 Redirects...

"301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances:

• You’ve moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.
• People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways – for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com – it’s a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL. You can also use Webmaster Tools to set your preferred domain.
• You’re merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages."

Ok, so how do I do execute 301 Redirects?
If you utilize WordPress.org as your site builder it is incredibly easy. Follow the effortless directions which are basically: put your old URL here and put your new URL there and we'll redirect your old one to your brand-new one.

If you are not making use of WordPress.org. Right here is a link I discovered that clarifies a number of different methods for implementing 301 redirects.

As we all know, it is not an easy task to climb up the organic search engine ladder, and you do not want to lose any sort of positioning you have gained over the months and years; especially if all it takes is a simple 301 redirect to accomplish your goal of altering URLs-- with or without considerable (hopefully much better) content change! It's effortless, and it is advised by Google-- enough said!