If you’ve ever had to move your home, you know there are many details that you need to work out before you pack away even a single knick knack or keepsake. Getting all your boxes in order, hiring movers, transporting your goods and your family – did you forget something? How are your friends going to find out about your new home? What about any important mail that comes to your house – how will that get forwarded to your new address? Hopefully you filled out a permanent change of address form before you left!
Moving or making changes to your website can be similar – whether you’re switching domains or changing technologies (such as changing from html to ASP). If you switch your pages around and visitors go to the old website address, then they’re likely to get one of those pesky 404 errors on their browser – annoying and certainly not good for your business!
There are ways to fix this, and a 301 redirect is one of the most popular (and preferred) ways to do it. Simply put, it is like filling out your permanent change of address form, to let users who log-on to your site or a particular page know that the information they are seeking is no longer there. With a 301 redirect, when the outdated URL is entered or when it shows up in a search engine, the visitor is immediately sent to the new page. The change happens smoothly, with the user hardly noticing the transition at all.
Changing and updating may be a good thing – perhaps you’ve expanded and just need a better back-end for your website. But there are disadvantages to changing URLs. First, if your website has been around for a while and enjoys a fairly good (or very good) organic SEO ranking, then you will jeopardize this ranking and may even get your site de-indexed from search engines like Yahoo or Google.
Next, if you’ve had yourself listed in directories or have relationships with other sites, then the visitors directed from these partners will receive that 404 error and you’ll risk losing their back links. Now you could go to each and every one of them and ask them to change it – but think of all the manpower you’ll be losing to do just this task.
With a 301 redirect, you’ll have the benefit of keeping your search engine rankings as well as easily pointing your audiences to the right place. If you have customers who have bookmarked your site (or some pages), then they won’t get a 404 error.
301 redirects tell search engines like Google that your URL has moved permanently, as well as updating your listings on search engine results pages. Additionally, you can have other domains use a 301 redirect to send people to your main site. For example, if your URL is abccompany.com, you can have visitors logging on to abccompany.ca and abccompany.biz go straight to your main site.
Despite all the debates, a 301 redirect is still the most SEO-friendly and easiest way to dispatch viewers from an old URL to another. If you’re thinking of making changes on your website’s URLs, make sure you take all these things into consideration. If you’re ready to make the change or still confused, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help!
Tags: 301 redirect, SEO, web site maintenance
