Using Redirects On Your Website
August 27th, 2008 by Dan
A site redesign is often well complemented with good redirects. A redirect
not only redirects human visitors but also the search engine spiders. It isn’t
necessary to lose a link to one of your pages and it isn’t necessary to have
to contact every site that links to you in the hope of getting them to update
your page. The preferred method of redirecting is using a 301 redirect capturing
all of your most important pages, and preferably all of the pages included
on your site.
Using Customised Redirects
In the event that a redirect does not cover every page, it can be advantageous
to offer a customised 404 error page. The 404 error page is displayed when
a visitor is unable to view a page when following a link. These links can be
internal from another page of your site, they may even be from search engine
results, or from other sites that have offered one or more of your pages a
link. Avoiding this error altogether is preferable but customising the 404
error page for your site is good practice anyway.
301 Redirects
When redesigning an existing site, using redirects helps ensure that your
pages retain their existing link popularity in the eyes of the search engine
algorithms. Without using a 301 redirect you would need to contact all the
sites that have provided a link to your pages and ask them to update the code
they use for the link. This is an ineffective method of updating your link
profile because few requests from those that naturally provided links will
result in a change and your new pages will not get the benefit of those links.
The Htaccess File
301 redirects are extremely successful and by adding the appropriate redirects
to your htaccess file it’s possible to affect a redesign and URL change without
having a negative impact on your marketing efforts. In the htaccess file you
will need to include a separate entry for each of the pages that you wish to
redirect and include a redirect from and to line. As such, the redesign and
changes need to be carefully planned and the information recorded for future
use.
One Aspect Of Site Redesigning
Redirects are only one part of redesigning a site and ensuring that it doesn’t
negatively impact on your past and existing SEO efforts. Ensuring that the
transition from old to new design should be planned well before the redesign
takes place, including the back up of important data and the recording of page
addresses. Once you have the old and new page URLs you can begin to ready a
new htaccess file so that as soon as the redesign is complete, saving this
htaccess to your server ensures the minimal amount of fuss.
301 Redirects And SEO
The 301 redirect is used because it almost seamlessly redirects both human
and software based visitors. Search engine spiders will pay attention to the
redirect path and human visitors will be automatically redirected without having
to take any further action. Stored in the htaccess file of your web server,
the redirect is an important factor to remember especially when page URLs will
change during the project.
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You can use 301 Redirect as a permanent redirect to your new URL. This is considered as a way to tell the server to redirect the visitor towards new URL when they come to old URL.
301 Redirect is also applicable to search engines. When a search engine robot visits your old page, it will be notified about the new URL by this 301 Redirect.
Usually a PHP redirect is much more reliable than other forms of redirects like HTTP redirect or JavaScript based redirects. For example, a JavaScript redirect may not work if the browser settings of user have turned off JavaScript.
PHP redirects will work, no matter what settings users have on their browser. This is because PHP is a server side script. It will not depend on browser settings that may affect JavaScript which parsed on the client-side/user side.