301 Redirect howto

URL redirecting 301 what is it and why should you use them

It’s fairly common for a website to get updated, and page names to change, or move, or to disappear altogether.  This isn’t a big deal, and most people never give it a second thought.  The most common method to solve the problem is to create a page that serves no purpose except to redirect the visitor, whether they be human or spider.  This can be accomplished using either meta-tag redirection, or be putting a line of text in the body of the page, and require visitors to click on the new link to access it.  While this is the “quick and easy” fix, not only do web design professionals advise against, but spiders crawling your site for a search engine may penalize you for it.

Search engines don’t care about the easy way out.  What they look for, and this is sometimes called SEO, and sometimes called webiquette, is a well written page.  A web page that is displayed solely for the purpose of redirecting to another web page doesn’t fit either description.  In fact, search engines may penalize the site, because exactly that kind of redirecting a user is a trick used by spammers and and other “less-than savory” web designers.  Since so many spamming sites use the technique to lure in visitors and then pass them on the shameless advertising, most bots won’t follow a redirection at all, and some are thought to penalize the site for having it.

So how can you send someone to a page that has changed?  If spiders don’t like meta tags or regular link redirection, what do they like?  Simple.  They like things done the right way.  Apache servers, which are a majority of web page servers, look for a file in the directory of every web page called “.htaccess” (note that the dot(.) is the first character, not the last), and if it exists, allow the contents of the file to override other settings.  The .htaccess file can be used for a variety of things, but it is most commonly used for error handling and redirection of target pages, or even redirecting entire websites.  Essentially, the 301 error code means “page (or site) moved permanently”. 

The method for using a 301 redirect is given below:
1. If the .htaccess file already exists on the site, load that file. Do not change existing lines!
    A. Create a file in a text editor (notepad) called .htaccess if it doesn’t exist yet.
2. If you are moving an entire site add a line that reads, if moving only a page, go to step 3
    Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/
3. If you have moved a page, type the following line
    Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/new-url-filename.html
4. Save the file to your site’s root directory.  PLAIN TEXT ONLY!

As mentioned, .htaccess tells a server how to handle errors.  Since a file that has been permanently moved would result in an error, using a 301 redirect avoids the error.  Search engines won’t penalize you for using .htaccess to redirect a visitor to a new location.  Since this is the “official” way a server deals with the situation, spiders don’t see anything unusual about using the file for this purpose.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com