Upgrading Your Website? Don’t Forget 301 Redirects or You’ll Be Sorry

301 redirects help protect the website during an upgrade, redesign or move. While they’re very easy to implement, many website owners and developers ditch them and within the process, this derails SEO efforts and may completely wipe off ranking in search.

What is a 301 Redirect?

If you would like to vary the URL of a page because it is shown in program results, Google recommends that you simply use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the simplest thanks to making sure that users and search engines are directed to the right page.

A 301 redirect is a status code that instructs search engines that a page/post has permanently moved to a replacement location. It asks the search engines to transfer prior SEO history to the new piece of content and at an equivalent time, it pushes website traffic to the present new location.

When to Use a 301 Redirect

• You have moved your site to a replacement domain and you would like to form sure both traffic and SEO history is routed to the new destination.
• You have changed a URL (page, post, product, category, etc.) and you would like your existing PageRank to transfer to the new URL.
• You have changed a URL and you want your traffic to the old URL rerouted to the new URL.
• You are merging two websites and need to form sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the right pages.