SEO on a Nickel - 301 Redirects, be not afraid!
Image Courtesy of MagpieShooter
I am not a programmer. Hell, I'm not even a designer. With that in mind, please know that in a lot of instances, SEO friendly redirects are REALLY easy to perform and can be very beneficial for your SEO efforts.
What is a 301 redirect?
I won't assume everyone knows what a 301 is, so let's start here. A 301 redirect is basically a signal telling browsers and crawlers that destination A has moved to destination B. A good example situation of this would be when an online store stops carrying Brand X cat food, but begins carrying Brand Z instead. Obviously you don't want old customers going to a dead page once you remove it, so you can set up a 301 so when visitors type in the URL for Brand X it sends them instead to Brand Z.
More than people friendly
So while this is obviously good for human users, it's also good for search engines. Keep in mind that search engines are in the business of giving users high quality results. If they find that you have dead pages, that's probably not going to help your site's rankings in general. Secondarily, if people are linking to your dead pages, you're effectively wasting all of that delicious link juice. In the previous example, any links pointing to the now defunct Brand X page are completely wasted. Once the search engine sees your redirect, it will credit the new page with the link juice and your Brand Z page will reap the rewards in the rankings.
Another valuable use of 301s is consistency. What SEOs refer to as canonicalization - meaning that your site can be reached at both http://www.yoursite.com as well as http://yoursite.com. While search engines seem pretty capable of dealing with this now (there's always a concern that one of the pages could be seen as duplicate content which is not a good thing). This can also come in handy if your site has a home page that's available from multiple URLs - sometimes you'll see this as a /index page or a /home page. This is problematic for two reasons - 1) It's another possible duplicate content issue and 2) If other sites begin naturally linking to these pages, you're not maximizing the links to your home page. Instituting 301s can solve these problems.
Instituting a 301 redirect
So you've found a couple of dead pages on your site, what do you need to do? First off, you'll need to know what type of site you have. Our site is done in .php so if we wanted to redirect a dead page to a new location, we would just add a page where the dead page was and insert this:
<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.wheremynewpageis.com" );
?>
That's it!
Depending on your type of site, you can do a google search and find all kinds of resources, just try something like "how to create a 301 redirect in html"
If you want to redirect all of your pages to the www version, you'll need to do a little more work (but not much). You'll want to get into your cpanel file manager or ftp and look at the root folder of your domain for a file called htaccess. If one exists, just add the following text to the file (you can edit it in notepad - just replace "yoursite" with your domain).
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yoursite.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
If you don't have an htaccess file, just make one in notepad and save the file without the .txt extension and upload it to the root folder via ftp.
SEO isn't always hard, and there's lots of things that you can do to improve your site without a ton of SEO knowledge. If you have a question on implementing any of this, just shoot me a question by filling out the contact form to your right.
Here are some other valuable redirect resources:
- http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
- http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/0405/redirects.html
Tags: 301 redirect, different kinds of redirects, how to do a 301 redirect, redirects for seo, seo redirects
This was very valuable for our website, as we were experiencing many of these same issues.