aaron dalrymple

I get a lot of questions from clients about redirects.

• How do I move my site to a new domain and keep my search engine rankings in tact?
• I’m going to take down some old pages/sites, will this affect my rankings?
• I’m redesigning my website and my directory and/or page names are changing, will the engines just point to the new pages?
• How can I tell the engines to send all my traffic to my home page?

There are answers to these questions, but first I usually say something like, “Are you sure you want to do that?” The reason I ask is that often times the pages or sites that the company wants to get rid of are older pages that have great link reputation and are well “aged” in the engines – they get crawled a lot, have a high Page Rank, etc. Plus, more content is usually better; can the pages be repurposed?

After assessing the need for getting rid of pages or moving domains or changing the page/directory structure (which are all valid and necessary in a lot of cases), using a 301 redirect is usually the answer. A 301 redirect won’t get you in trouble with the search engines as some redirects, like a meta-tag refresh, can. It tells the engine that a page has permanently moved and asks if it would please start indexing the new page in its place. It’s the safest way to change page names, domains, directories, etc. when changing these elements of your website. If you’re deleting an old mini-site or set of pages, you should consider redirecting each page you’re deleting to a similar page on your new or main site.

The next question is, naturally, “how do I do that?”

Here are some good sources that I’ve com across recently on redirects, 301s and how to implement them:

Steve Hargrove – How to redirect a web page, the smart way - added 6/20 

Wikipedia – URL redirection

TamingTheBeast.net – Giving search engine spiders direction

SEOBook – .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy

Bruce Clay, Inc. – Sorting out Redirects