Choosing the best redirect for your SEO
Greetings everyone !!!
Today I’ll talk a bit about page web redirection, also called redirect and how to use them properly to optimize your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
It exists a lot of manner to redirect someone from a page to another.
Today, we’ll focus on what we call “HTTP Redirect”, based on HTTP header that are sent by the server to browser or search engine.
They are also plenty of way for doing HTTP redirect, but the 2 majors are usually called by their respective code:
- 301 redirect (permanent)
- 302 redirect (temporary)
When to use the 302 redirect and how about the 301 ?
The 302 redirects are in most cases, the default redirects you can find on any website.
Let’s say for example, I want to access on the admin page on this blog. This specific page require my browser to be logged as admin. So I go to the login page, hit my login and password and then, my browser receive a 302 redirect to the admin page and the page display properly because I have all the requirement to see it.
What happen if I call the “admin page” without being log, then in most cases, my browser also get a redirect but this time, to the login page to force me to login and get all the requirements before watching/editing the admin page.
Here is the great use of 302 redirect.
But how about 301 redirect, and why are they use?
It may happen, for various reasons, that you have to change the complete URL of your site.
The problem is: How to deal with search engine like Google that store in their index the old addresses ?
If you change straight away all the URLs on your site, this will generate probably generate lots of 404 error because of the old addresses in search engine index (who does not exists anymore) and you may loose all your site’s reference on Google.
That is exactly the moment to use 301 (alias permanent redirect). Instead of showing a (bad) nice 404 error, why dont you send a 301 redirect to the new address that holds the page?
Benefit for that is that you site’s pages wont loose their page rank on search engine, as well as teaching the search engine “hey dude, the page URL have change now and here is the new address”
I know it has been said a thousand of time in SEO tutorial, but I still see website who make 302 instead of 301. So I hope this article will help people improving their knowledge on the Internet referencing.
See you soon
I have a question about 301 redirect. if i have built many link to any page say page-1, as you said for various reason i need to change the address say page-2. after redirecting 301, can i get all those built back link to that page-2?
and i also want to know about canonical redirect. can you please post more info about it?
Hi and thanks for your question.
Actually, to change all the links on your site from page-1 to point on page-2, you need to update your site code to make them all points to page-2.
301 redirect are only useful to search engine, because they kept in their cache the old “page-1″.
The page-1 has a score and keywords, so if you don’t want to loose scoring on that page, you can “transfert” the score/keywords with 301 redirect, which avoid creation of duplicate content. (Duplicate content –> 2 URLs having the same keywords/content but different score…)
The “rel=canonical” is a page attribute that help search engine understanding which URL is the primary address in case of duplicate content.
Let’s say we have page-1, page-2 and page-3 pointing to (almost) the same content.
Using “rel=canonical” on page-1 will help search engine understanding which of the 3 pages is the best one to be indexed.
This can help for example, for site’s search results.
We can imaging we have the following pages:
– /seo
– /seo?sort=dates
– /seo?sort=
If we imagine those 3 pages are exactly (almost) the same results, since default sort order are “dates”, we dont want search engine to index the 3 identical pages with sort parameters. Rel=canonical will help define “/seo” as being the primary page for this result…
In this case, “rel=canonical” is only a “trick” to help webmaster to “fix quickly” the problem.
The best solution is to avoid duplicate content by using a single/clean URL for this content…
Notamment un travail continu sur la qualité du site et sur ses liens permettra d’atteindre progressivement l’objectif qui est LA PAGE 1 DE GOOGLE.s the excellent reviews some other people have written, will help you decide if it’s the right choice for you.
Here are a few more tips and tricks for apache and 301 redirects for SEO which you can find here – http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/seo/using-htaccess-for-301-redirects-seo-and-more/
I appreciate your well define explanation regarding redirects. Some webmaster don’t really understand this things.
Thank you!
Thanks for the great info. Starting an SEO company has proven very time consuming, and I’m glad I found your blog. I was actually asking myself about redirects and I stumbled on your site. Great info, thanks!
are there differences between google.com and regionals google (ie:google.it)?
Thanks anyway for this article, great info
Great emphasis on using 301s for the search engines. It might be noted that there are different ways of generating those 301s, depending on your system and your access and your configuration. Sometimes these redirects are able to be set up on the control panel of a shared hosting site, sometimes you can do it using a plugin to your CMS, sometimes using the .htaccess file for your web server, etc.
In terms of the canonical attribute, there are times when the CMS you are using (WordPress for example) may automatically generate different ways of getting to your pages (such as the ?P=## parameter versus a full seo friendly URL). In general, using the canonical shows the search engines that you are trying to respect them, and helping them to keep from filling their indexes with duplicate pages.
This is probably one of the best examples of 302 and 301 redirects. It actually took me forever to get this right and now that I do, I never have a problem with site moves or subdomain additions. The worst is trying to explain what a redirect is in general to a client that wants to move the web contents to a different blog or CMS, drives me nuts.
I have been having problems trying to redirect the http://www version of a site’s domain name to the non-www version despite it appearing to be an easy enough thing to do. I use hostgator. Any idea what I’m doing wrong? The message I receive is that I have created a loop that cannot resolve to the non-www.
Hello,
Very interesting and valuable article, I will tell my friends about it.
Jerzy