Sometimes you need to upgrade or redesign your popular website to keep your site up to date with recent web technologies and features. But while working with these you might not consider about 301 redirects that may cause an extreme negative impact on your search ranking. Your SEO efforts may completely wipe away if forget to maintain it. Basically, 301 redirects is quite easy to implant and it will protect your during an redesigning process.

To be honest previously developing 301 redirects and managing them was considered as the core part of website site development projects and the certain list of item was included within it during the projects implantation.

But recently we have been noticing lots of quarries and objections from social media and through mail from website owners and bloggers about the redirect issue. So it is apparent that the 301 redirects becomes a vital issue which needs to be considered in the time of upgrading website and blog.

Today I am about to elaborate a quick recap on what 301 are and why they are so important for you.

What 301 redirect actually?

It may be referring to a status code that provides instruction to search engines that your website, post or pages is moved permanently to a new location.  I also request the search engines to move the previous history to the new destination as well as it influences the upcoming traffic to the new address. In a nutshell if you change the URL of your website but you want to have the same search ranking by Google then Google recommend to use a serve side 301 redirect which will redirect the traffic to the new address from the old search results.

When to Use a 301 Redirect?

You will need to have the redirects features when…

1. You need to move your site to a new domain to ensure that you are not losing the SEO history and traffic
2. If you have changed URL and want to have same page rank for your existing your post, pages or category
3. If you want to merge two websites and want to redirect them to correct page.

Do you know what page rank is? it’s just like a numbering which is assigned by Google. Google use this number to indicate how well your website on web.

Setting Up 301 Redirects

There are several ways which you may follow to set up redirects 301. There are 3 methods that usually recommended by developer.

.htaccess File

Technical way to add a 301 redirect for websites which are hosted on serves running apache, you need to access to the htaccess file. This may be pretty scary for non-techy person.

htaccess file 301 redirect example

Redirection Plugin for WordPress

However there are some cool plug-ins which you can use for WordPress websites thus you can also use theme without any technical knowledge. Redirection is one of the popular redirection plug in which is pretty good and intuitive for use.

In consolation

Hope you have already realized the importance of 301 redirects. It will handle PageRank and SEO history and do not end to 404 pages. So utilize the features while you need to rebuild or reconstruct you old site.