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Posted by mariam.shariff on March 30th, 2009

301 Redirect:  Oh no, not another Diversion

You know how it is when you’re sitting in traffic and you see a diversion sign.  It’s not good news is it?  Will you still be able to get to your intended destination?  How much longer will it take to get there?

Redirects are the online equivalent of diversions and search engines don’t like them any more than we like traffic diversions.  So using a redirect could adversely affect your search engine ranking, which will reduce valuable traffic to your website. 

But sometimes, redirects are unavoidable, perhaps because you are:

• changing your company name or website address
• renaming your web pages
• altering your website directory structure as part of your online strategy
• protecting your brand by buying-up all variations of your domain name and directing them to your site
• changing your domain names as a result of changing your hosting provider

So does it mean that when a redirect is absolutely necessary, you are going to lose your previous search engine ranking?

Thankfully, this need not be the case. There are various ways to do a redirect without losing traffic.  For example, you might use a Meta refresh tag, employ the JavaScript or form method.  But the most search engine friendly redirect, and the one I would recommend to clients, for all of the above legitimate redirect reasons, is the 301 redirect.

The 301 redirect is a server side redirection.  This means that once a search engine or user comes into the page looking for a previous URL, they will be automatically redirected to the new URL.  They will also be simultaneously informed to remember the redirect because the change is permanent.

If you are using an IIS server, you can accomplish an IIS redirect using the Administrator’s section of the server software.  For more details on the technical side of this subject, check out the various methods of a 301 redirect.

A trick I’ve learned to minimise the risk to your search engine ranking, is to redirect small sections of your site, one at a time, and note the response from the search engines.  Once you know that the response is positive, you can then proceed to redirect larger sections of the website confidently.

Done properly however, a 301 redirect will attribute search engine rankings from the old page URL to the new one.  So, if you’ve redesigned your site and changed your URLs, a well-executed 301 redirect will maintain your page rankings and might even improve them!  If only road diversions could be so efficient.

By the way, we don’t expect clients to do all of this work themselves.  If you’d like more information or advice about 301 redirects, get in touch to find out how our Website Designers based in Leicester could make life easy for you.

Mariam Shariff
Studio 2 Online – Web Design Leicester