Everything you ever wanted to know about 301 Redirection and were afraid to ask

This is Part One of a continuing series to educated readers on the perils of not-using 301 redirection, the benefits of doing so, and the actual technical How To to get the job done.

Who this document is aimed at

Readers who are unfamiliar with using 301 redirection to forward their domain traffic. DIY SEOs who want high traffic rankings.

Things you need to know about 301 Redirection

There are two cases you need to know about 301 re-direction. The first case is when you move the content of one website to another. In that case, you’ll redirect the traffic permanently to the new domain. The second case involved the fact your website generally has a www and a non-www version, which can be considered to be a big no-no in Google.

The Google Problem

Google has clamped down on duplicate content in recent years, and many websites suffered when they had two separate versions of the same page content answering at different URLs. An example.

http://www.sootle.com/789.html
and
http://sootle.com/789.html are both ways of referring to the same page, only with completely different URLs. It’s rare when a webhost ever sets these up correctly as part of the default, so in almost every case, you need to set themselves. It doesn’t matter which one you pick, but the one you pick is how you’ll refer to your website from now on. The best part is, once you setup the 301 Redirection, it doesn’t matter how people link to your website. The links that are already placed to your website on remote domains will be automatically re-written to the their new format.

If you click on the example URL above, you’ll see how a Redirect looks in your browser: it’s basically seamless.

Once the URLs are re-written to their new format, Google will combine the Pagerank that was previously split into a unified URL which should rank better than ever. This helps “repair” rankings drops for a lot of people. Having your PageRank split in two is the main reason many websites suffer lower rankings than they expect.

Ways that can fix this, which will be covered in separate blog posts.

1) You can use .htaccess and Mod-Rewrite to rewrite the traffic.
2) You can use PHP or ASP scripting to rewrite it.
3) For Google alone, you can use the Google Preferred Domain option.

Each one of these methods has it’s own advantages, drawbacks, and technical difficulties so we’ll cover them in seperate posts.

Click here for Part Two of this series.