301 redirect prospects in seo

Occasionally lots of urls are being made on regular basis with only few of them having long term future prospects. Some important urls may also behaving duplicate copies of similar content. In this case both the pages have some ratio of user traffic. Now one can’t show a 404 Error page. So you need to redirect the url to the more relevant page:

1.  Suppose one page is having 30% and the other having 70% traffic, then the former must be put to 301 Permanent redirection to the latter.
2. If the page is not so important and you need to change the url itself for keywords reordering purpose, then its better to show 404 Error page and create the new page with the correct url rather than redirecting every such kind of page.
3. Redirection can be done in several ways. We need to decide the method or their combination to be employed which exactly serves our purpose:
   1. Redirecting a single url to a specific url,
   2. Redirecting all the folder realated urls to a specific folder’s index.html,
   3. One-to-one redirection of url inside one folder to another folder urls(with more specific folder name and path) – this rule must be used only when each page relevancy is quite higher or else the entire folder redirection is a better solution,
   4. Redirecting rest of the pages to the root domain.

When using a combination of such redirection method, special care must be taken into the order in which the redirections have been ordered. All these methods are also used to leverage the website rank. Redirection definition must start with more specific one,the flow of control must be maintained with the definition ending with the general redirection* which must be applied at the end of the .htaccess.

We use 301 redirect when forwarding entire traffic form one domain to another or for redirection related to affiliate partners. This type of redirection is search engine friendly and also the response time is negligible affected from the visitors prospective.

Unlike 302 redirect(used for a temporary period), 301 redirect is a permanently moved redirection rule. So when using this it also add to the SEO ranking, i.e, if page rank for the new page is good signifies that the search engines are now following the permanent 301 redirection rule. More than the SEO prospects, visitors’ response time must be given higher priority when going for redirection.

There are a few SEO people who unnecessarily make use of the redirection rule in order to increase their website page ranks. In this case search engines may penalize these web pages. So unless not needed the redirection rule, 404 Error page must be displayed. However there are a few cases where redirection is an absolute necessity.

Normally 301 redirection is being used here to move the entire domain. Search engines keep track of the history/age of domains being redirected, so on basis of all these data they follow the new domain.

Reason to use redirection:

1. The page is no more existing but the page links are available on several other websites as a result offpage SEO,
2. Visitors have bookmarked the webpage,
3. Content duplicacy on more than one of the pages,
4. Page url is not relevant to the user search keywords and doesn’t serve the purpose,
5. The visitor traffic to the subordinate and add-on domain(like .ca, .net, .co.uk, .org, .co.in) is to be moved to the main domain landing page(often the home page)

SEO Freindly 301 permanent redirect

Search engines add the page rank of the old page to the new page and they make sure that only the new page url is being indexed. What a search engine get when following the new page: “Status Code HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”.

Interesting Posts:
htaccess 301 folder redirect