301 redirects can be a beautiful thing. A 301 redirect basically tell’s Google or any other search engine that a page has permanently moved. It’s a digital change of address form.
There are a few reasons to use a 301 redirect and many benefits in using one. You can easily set them up either through a WordPress plug-in or through your htaccess file. Let’s take a look at some practical applications of when, why and how to use them.
Site Redesign
The Internet is constantly evolving and so should your website. Maybe you moved from Joomla to WordPress or went from creating url’s like www.example.com/article.html to a more streamlined and current url like example.com/article/
No matter what changes are being made, as long as their is a change to your url structure you’ll want to implement a few 301 redirections. Depending on the number of pages already on your site you may do your 301’s individually and hand write out each one or make bulk changes using a wildcard approach.
New Domain
Maybe that .com finally got released to the public, you bought it and now you want to move your old .net website over to the new .com domain. You could just transfer all your files and call it a day, but then your website would essentially be starting from scratch from a search engine marketing aspect.
A wildcard 301 redirect would be exactly what you need in this scenario.
Updating Old Content
There’s a popular city blog where I live as I there probably is where you live as well. They are the go to and the authority for everything going on in the city. If you want to know what the best slice of pizza is in the city, they come up multiple times in the first few pages of Google.
The problem? They have multiple articles on the best slices of pizza that span over multiple years. Instead of having just 1 article of the 5 best pizza slices in the city, you end up going down a spiral reading about 20-25 of the best pizza slices. This is terrible for the user experience as now the user is even more confused with too many options of where to get their pizza. As well, some of them are no longer even in business!
Using 301 redirects to point all the older pizza slice articles to the most recent and relevant article has a great effect for not only SEO, but also the user. It becomes the only article they see and takes all the link juice from the previous articles and compounds it into 1 super article. (but only use this technique for articles covering the same topic and not to trick Google or it will end up having a negative effect on your site.)
Why Use 301 Redirects
Now you may be asking yourself, “why even bother with redirects? Google will find my new pages and lose the old ones.”
This is true. However, what you do lose out on is your link juice and all your previous SEO and link building endeavors. When you move a page to a new URL or domain, Google see’s it as a new page and all your previous marketing efforts go down the drain. With a 301 redirect, all the links that carry over from the old page will now point to the new page/site and become a continuation of where you left off.
Link juice aside, you might also have pages that are bookmarked by users. Without a redirect, those visitors would go to a 404 error page instead of the page they were looking for.
How To Use 301 Redirects
You will of course need access to your HTAccess file in the root folder of your domain. If you’re unfamiliar with the parameters you need to properly code in htaccess, do a search within Stack Overflow to help you out. They have plenty of ways to make the changes you need.
Alternatively, Webconfs offer’s a great redirect tool that’s easy to use and covers various 301 wildcard applications.
And if you’re really tentative about coding, find a 301 plug-in for your CMS.
