Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

301 Server Side Redirect – or die

November 7, 2009

So, why is a 301 redirect so important? Firstly, I won’t assume you know what I’m even talking about. I am referring to to a command you must include on your server when you change your web site address or a file name on your site. You have to spread the word to visitors, other sites that link to yours, and most importantly to search engines that your old location or address has changed permanently.

There are a number of types of server side redirections you can use, such as: 301, 302, meta refresh, etc. The 301 refers to a Permanent redirection at the domain level. The 302 is Temporary, or used when you have a temporary redirection of a page, etc. A meta refresh is just downright ugly and should never be considered as it appears to the search engines as a common spamming technique – reduces page rank and overall bad news.

The results from not employing the 301 when you should include massive drop off in traffic, resulting from Google deciding not to pass that good page rank you worked hard to build up, off to your new URL. This occurred over the last weekend. Major trauma – “what’s going on with our Google traffic?” There was a loss of thousands of visitors and therefore revenue over a two-week period of time because this particular off-shore development team made a change to the URL within the ecommerce area without notifying the search team as to what it was doing and why. Very long story short, they had input a 302, or temporary redirect. Google saw this as a caution and held back indexing our pages. It was noticed once our traffic and revenue starting falling. I asked this particular dev team to replace this redirect with the correct 301 immediately. Once this was redirected properly, all recovered and we finally resumed back to our normal traffic and revenue numbers within a few days.

Please do your company and yourselves a favor and always include a 301 redirect from your old pages and domains to the new! This will save you lots of wasted time and energy. It should become a regular part of your overall development process. As an SEO whether in-house or consultant, it is your job to educate your development team just as much if not more so than other stake-holders in the company.

Good Luck and don’t forget to 301!

Filed under: SEO Factors