Save Your Ranking With a 301 Redirect
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
…”But, I’ll lose my ranking!!”
There are many times when you have to make a change to your web site. Maybe you’re doing a complete redesign. Maybe you’re just changing the look and feel of a few pages. Maybe you’re taking down some outdated material.
Whatever the reason, you probably often find yourself removing old web pages.
The problem? Those old pages have search engine ranking and you don’t want to lose it!
The solution is simple. Create a 301 Redirect.
A 301 Redirect tells the search engine that your page has “Moved Permanently” and is the correct way to let them know so they can update accordingly.
How to create a 301 redirect
Creating them is very simple. Just add one line to your .htaccess file on the root directory of your web site. If you don’t have an .htaccess file, just open any text editor like notepad and save a file as .htaccess and then upload it to the root directory of your web site.
And be sure to add this line:
redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.html
So if your old page was IloveJohnElderSEO.html and you need to change it to JohnElderSEOisGod.html the line to add in your .htaccess file would look like this:
redirect 301 /IloveJohnElderSEO.html http://www.you.com/JohnElderSEOisGod.html
that’s it! Now if someone goes to that old page, they will be redirected automatically to the new page. And if a search engine spiders your site, they will receive a 301 moved permanently message.
There’s a couple things to note here. These instructions are for someone running your basic Apache web server on a unix/linux type server. I don’t really know IIS microsoft type servers so you’ll have to figure out how to redirect on them yourself.
The other thing to note is this. Your server is probably already configured for this, but if you create your redirect .htaccess file and it doesn’t work (go to the old page, if it doesn’t redirect, it doesn’t work!) you may have to make a small change to the configuration of your servers httpd.conf file (kind of like a settings file).
Locate your server’s httpd.conf file (mine is located in /usr/local/apache/conf/). Search for a line that says AllowOverride None and change it to AllowOverride All. If you can’t find that line at all, add it.
That’s it.
There are many ways to redirect a web page. You can use a Meta redirect, or a simple perl or php script or any of a zillion other ways. But creating a 301 redirect via .htaccess is the only real or correct way to do this that won’t get you into trouble with the search engines.
A 301 is not the only redirect available. There’s a “Moved temporarily” and many others. Here’s a list and their uses.
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-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
