You’ve just launched a new website and have changed some of the URLs in the process. Having spent all of that time looking at the website design and migrating all of your old copy and images onto the new platform it might be tempting to skip a few corners to speed up the go live process. Setting up a full set of page by page 301 redirects from old pages to the new URLs might seem a time consuming thing that you can drop.
Don’t get tempted to do this though as from a Search Engine Optimisation point of view the 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs is the make or break in making sure that your new website benefits from your previous SEO work and performs well in the search engines.
A 301 header status basically tells the search engine that the URL it is looking for has permanently moved to a new location – this will permanently move any links pointing to the old URL and search engines will transfer any goodness or value from the old URL to the new one.
Putting in redirects that show users the correct pages but serves a 200 (OK) status header to search engines will not benefit from this transfer of the value of the old URL.
Not making sure that you have correct 301 redirects in place when your new website goes live will only hinder your website maintaining it’s currently rankings and hinder it getting any new rankings. So if you are thinking of cutting corners on your new website make sure you don’t miss out on doing the 301 redirects as they are very important to your site’s visibility in Google.
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