Patrick McDowell's Blog

Welcome to the first in my SEO Tip of the Day series! If the title is not self-explanatory enough, I will be providing you with daily tips in SEO, Internet marketing, and web design to help you learn the business, or keep your memory fresh. So without further delay, today we will be covering the importance of 301 redirects.

Any time you make a major change in your website, search engines need time to figure out what you did, and update your rankings accordingly. If you do not properly “instruct” the search engines on what you changed, they can no longer find the page that is in their results. As you can imagine this effect would be disastrous, so how do you change a URL without being penalized for it?

Let’s look at an example. Your doing some on-page SEO and you decide to change this:

yourdomain.com/startrek_novel_01.jpg

To this:

yourdomain.com/novels/science_fiction/startrek.jpg

Obviously you made a wise choice, as the second URL is much more organized, and thus will rank better. However now potential customers that may have bookmarked this page can now no longer get to it, and it won’t be long before you loose any and all rank you had for that page in the search engines. Luckily a quick 301 redirect will fix both of these issues. Simply add one line to your .htaccess file:

(If you are not sure what or where your .htaccess file is, it is a small text file located at the top level of your domain. It is possible you may not have one, and if that is the case just fire up notepad, save it as whatever, upload it to the top of your domain, and rename it “.htaccess” without the quotes.)

That’s all you have to do. Now anytime a visitor or a spider goes to the original URL, they will be automatically redirected to your new one. As mentioned before, this is particularly important for search engines, because if you use 301 redirects your rankings will be preserved. Just remember, it would be wise to do this for every URL change you make. Never assume the search engines understand what you are doing, regardless of how simple it may seem.

If you would simply like to redirect everything on one domain to another, use the following:

Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com

Note the “/” before your target URL. That indicates everything from the top level of your old domain down should be redirected. You can also redirect dynamic content, however that is beyond the scope of today.

Well that wraps up our first day. Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments below. Until tomorrow, cheers