Following my blog last week about changing your domain name we were asked about the term 301 and what it means so I thought I’d post a bit more about 301 redirects this week, restarting my “SEO Speak” series which has been a bit neglected in recent months.
So what is a 301?
Well the first thing to cover in this post is what a header status is as this is what a 301 is.
Whenever a page is viewed on the internet the server it’s hosted on creates a message to send to the browser or search engine about the status of the page. A working web page should send a 200 header status which tells the browser or search engines that the page is “OK”. If a page is broken or missing from a website the website should create a 404 header status, which tells the browser or Google that the page is broken.
If you move pages around on your website – because of a redesign or if you are removing obsolete pages from the site, the best thing to do for both users and search engines is to automatically redirect them to the new location of the page in question. So for example if www.yoursite.co.uk/products/running-shoes was an old page on your website which you’ve moved to www.yoursite.co.uk/running-shoes following a redesign on the site, then a 301 redirect will enable you to automatically redirect people from the old URL to the new one. This means that anyone who has a bookmark saved for the old page or follows a link from the SERPs in Google to the old page then they will see the new page and not a broken (404) page.
301 is the message that says to Google “moved permanently” which means that when Google finds the redirect you’ve put in place it will know that from now onwards the page to index is the new location and not the old one. This 301 will help to ensure that Google learns the new location of your pages, updates the SERPs with the new location.
There are other methods of performing a redirect but these aren’t as efficient at getting Google to permanently remove the old URL from the listings and use the new location instead.
For example you can use a 302 redirect. A 302 redirect will still send users to the new location of your page but tells search engines that this is only a temporary move so the SERPs probably won’t be updated using this method.
Another method was mentioned by Hannah in her most recent blog “Moving web content in a server side technology independent way” you can also use a Meta refresh and canonical tag but this won’t refresh Google’s listings for your website.
From an SEO point of view using a 301 redirect when you change your site is the best way to ensure that you don’t lose rankings or authority in the search engines.
Related posts:
