301 Permanent Redirect What, Why & How?

What is 301 Permanent Redirect?

According to a W3.org resource page, a 301 redirect means, "The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs." Meaning the site has moved and the user will now be forwarded to the domain indicated within the redirect.

Need of 301 permanent redirect?

1)      Moving and Renaming particular files - Search engines have indexed your entire site and many pages rank well. By moving and renaming these files, you run the risk of losing a lot of traffic and leaving visitors to your site who follow a search engine link with the dreaded "Error 404 - File not found“.

2)      Have moved to new domain - If you have moved a site to a new domain and you want your normal traffic to follow, a 301 permanent redirect needs to be employed.

3)      Switching sites from .nets to .com, etc. - To preserve your rank, you will want to inform others who link to you of your change of address. Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a "301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved. “Doing so not only informs any site visitors, it also informs search engines (except for Yahoo) that the site has moved.

4)      Having multiple domains pointing to specific pages of main domain - If these additional domain names aren't redirected properly all of your sites may end up getting banned in the search engines. Because the search engines are sensitive to duplicate content, using a 301 redirect in a situation like this can save your site from undue penalties. 

How to implement? (Apache):

1)      Create .htaccess file - Download the .htaccess file in the root directory of where all your web pages are stored (root directory). If there is a .htaccess file already in existence with lines of code present, then scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then create a new line that follows this example:

        redirect 301 /test.html http://www.abc.com/new.html

                redirect 301 / http://www.xyz.com

2)       Save the file, upload it back into your web and test it.

Search Engines & 301 Permanent Redirect:

•          The 301 redirect is the safest way to preserve your rankings.

•           In the next update, the old file name and path *should* be dropped and replaced with the new one.

•          If you're changing domain names and using a 301 redirect, you'll need to leave the old domain name and files in place for a few weeks to give the major search engines time to catch on to the changes.

•          Once you deactivate the old domain, any search engine kudos you've built up through those links will be gone.

•          301 redirect is search engine friendly. We can set 302 meta refresh redirect also, but this technique often used by spammers to trick search engines and it should be avoided.

What the search engine spammers do is to create a page that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases - it usually has no real content. The page is then picked up by some search engines, but when a visitor clicks on the search engine entry, they are redirected to another site, often unrelated.

For more information about image optimization, kindly contact PBS Guru at www.profitbysearch.com.

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