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December 31, 2020
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January 4, 2021Guide to 301 Redirects in SEO
301 redirects are an important part of managing a website—especially if you have a lot of internal pages to manage. They can also make or break your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
But despite their commonness and utility for web management, 301 redirects are frequently misunderstood. What exactly are these redirects, and how should you be using them as part of your SEO strategy?
Table of Contents
What Are 301 Redirects?
Let’s start with the basics. What is a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect is a specific type of redirect; redirects always function by rerouting web traffic from one page to another page. Specifically, 301 redirects are designed to imply a permanent move of content from one page to another.
Why the “301?” What does this number mean? It’s a simple reference to the HTTP status code of the page being redirected. You can review all the HTTP status codes here.
After receiving a client request, the server’s response would look something like this:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.seo.co/index.asp
If you’re not familiar with the technical aspects here, it’s best to think of it with an analogy. Let’s say you owned a store in a mall, but you decided to move to a new location in the same mall. A shopper visits your old location, since they don’t know you moved. The 301 redirect is like a sign outside the store that says, “We’re not here anymore. We’ve moved to a new location.” For this analogy to work, the sign also automatically sends the visitor to the new location—so imagine there’s some kind of automatic conveyer belt that leads them there.
In practice, it works something like this: You have a page titled “bee communication” that’s all about how bees communicate. Eventually, you decide to work that into a bigger piece about bee colonies called “bee colonies.” You don’t intend to move the page back, ever. You can set up a 301 redirect so that all would-be visitors to the “communication” page are sent to the “colonies” page instead.
How Do 301 Redirects Affect SEO?
So how do 301 redirects affect SEO?
You’ll find some conflicting theories on this topic within the SEO community, mostly because the SEO influence of 301 redirects has changed slightly.
To understand the relationship between 301 redirects and SEO, you first need to understand how SEO works. SEO is a complex series of strategies that are all designed to help your website rank higher in Google search results. There are many “ranking factors” to consider, but one of the most important is PageRank.
PageRank is an objective evaluation of a website’s trustworthiness, evaluated based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to that site. The more links you have, and the better those links are, the higher your PageRank will be. The higher your PageRank is, the higher you’ll rank in search results.
Prior to 2016, setting up a 301 redirect would cause you to “lose” PageRank from an inbound link that would otherwise generated. In other words, your inbound links would lose ranking power if they were redirected by a 301 redirect. Google was never super clear on this point, but SEO professionals estimated the loss to be around 15 percent.
However, in 2016, Gary Illyes revealed in a tweet that “30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore.”
That’s good news. It means that 301 redirects are perfectly fine as far as PageRank is concerned; if you have an inbound link that goes to a nonexistent page of your site, but that page has a 301 redirect that leads to the new page, the new page will receive 100 percent of that PageRank.
Because of this, 301 redirects are a powerful SEO tool. If a page of your site is obsolete, broken, or otherwise “gone,” ordinarily it would simply no longer receive PageRank (and no longer appear in search engine results pages, or SERPs). But with a 301 redirect you can give the page a kind of new life, especially if the page throws off a 404 error.
301 redirects are also useful for resolving canonical issues and improving your SEO potential in other ways.
How to Fix SEO Issues With 301 Redirects
If you want to use 301 redirects for SEO effectively, these are some of the best strategies to follow:
- Redirect your old and obsolete pages. 301 redirects are designed for pages that have permanently moved. Accordingly, you should use them to redirect traffic that might have gone to your old and obsolete pages. If you have pages that aren’t well-written, or those that are out of date, get rid of them and set up a 301 redirect so you don’t lose any PageRank from their removal.
- Remove redirected pages from your sitemap. Additionally, it’s important to remove redirected pages from your official sitemap. The 301 redirect will preserve the power of any existing inbound links pointing to the page, but there’s a chance it could still be crawled or considered by Google. It’s best to simply remove it from your website entirely.
- Send HTTP links to HTTPS. HTTPS pages have a ranking advantage, since Google favors sites with SSL certificates. Accordingly, it’s a good idea to use 301 redirects to send traffic to pages with HTTP to equivalent pages with HTTPS.
- Minimize redirect chains and loops. As you’re setting up 301 redirects, there’s a chance you could run into issues like chains and loops. With a redirect chain, you’ll send visitors on an overly lengthy path; a 301 redirect could send a visitor from page A to page B, from page B to page C, from page C to page D, and so on. With too many nodes on this web, this can be a detriment to the average user’s experience. Accordingly, you may face ranking penalties. With a redirect loop, you’ll send a visitor from page A to page B, from page B to page C, and from page C to page A, resulting in an infinite loop. These are rare, and usually the result of an egregious oversight. However, they should be avoided at all costs.
- Find and fix broken pages and redirects. Broken pages can arise under many different circumstances. If a page no longer works or if the content has been removed, it can be bad for your website; not only will Google frown upon it, it could leave users with a negative impression of your brand. Go out of your way to track down these pages and set up 301 redirects to keep them functional. You may also want to consider using a broken link building service as a means of acquiring more backlinks as you look for broken links to other competitor sites.
- Replace 302 redirects with 301 redirects. 302 redirects are another kind of redirect, and a perfectly valid one—as long as you use them appropriately. 302 redirects are designed to be temporary, made for pages that are only going to be offline for a short period of time. If you decide that the page will be taken down permanently, you’ll need to replace the 302 redirect with a 301 redirect.
How to Implement 301 Redirects
There are a few different techniques you can use to implement a 301 redirect. However, the easiest and most straightforward way is to edit your website’s .htaccess file.
In the root folder, you should find the .htaccess file. If you don’t, it could mean that your site isn’t running on an Apache web server. Otherwise, it could mean that you don’t have an .htaccess file yet; if this is the case, you can simply create one using a program like Notepad or TextEdit. Just save it as .htaccess instead of .txt.
In the .htaccess, file you’ll add code like this:
Redirect 301 /previous-page.html /new-page.html
Note that if your site is running on Windows/IIS or Nginx, you’ll need to follow a different set of instructions.
If you’re using WordPress or a similar website builder, you may be able to implement 301 redirects even easier with the help of a redirect plugin. With the right plugin, you may be able to simply enter your old page and new page, then set up the redirect automatically.
It’s also possible to set up even bigger, more impactful 301 redirects:
- Redirecting domains. Instead of redirecting a single page, you can redirect an entire domain.
- Redirecting www. links to non-www. links. You can set up redirects to send users from a non-www. link to a www. link (or vice versa).
- Redirecting HTTP links to HTTPS links. You can set up redirects to send users from an HTTP link to an HTTPS link (or vice versa).
Best Practices for 301 Redirects With SEO
If you’re going to work with 301 redirects to improve your website’s position for SEO, you’ll need to follow some important strategies.
- Be proactive. First, be proactive, rather than reactive. If you discover that a page of your website is broken, you can establish a 301 redirect to preserve its functionality. However, it’s much better if you anticipate the page going down and set up the 301 redirect before you truly need it.
- Test your work. Setting up a 301 redirect is relatively easy. With a bit of practice, it will become second nature to you. However, you shouldn’t assume that your redirect is working properly. It only takes a few seconds to test whether the redirect is working as intended; simply enter the URL of the old page and see if you’re taken to the new page in your browser of choice. Always test when setting up a new redirect. Make sure you avoid backlink-killing redirect chains with something like HTTSTATUS.
- Look for broken or nonfunctional pages. Spend some time auditing your site periodically. Review your sitemap and the individual pages of your site. If you encounter a broken or nonfunctional page (including a page that’s no longer relevant), consider taking it down and setting up a 301 redirect.
- Look for 301 redirects on your outbound links. It’s also important to realize that other websites will also be setting up 301 redirects occasionally. Most of the time, these are valuable for user experience, and you’ll see no major difference between the old page and the new page. However, sometimes, these 301 redirects can lead users to a very different page. Review your outbound links to ensure they’re not going to unverified new pages.
- Pay attention to traffic and rankings. As you set up more 301 redirects, pay careful attention to the inbound traffic and search engine rankings of those pages. If you see a major boost in the rankings and inbound traffic of your new target pages, you can be confident that you made a good decision funneling traffic and PageRank to that page. If you don’t notice any discernable difference, it could be a sign that something in your strategy is off—or that your 301 redirect isn’t working.
- Consider combining your best content. One of the best ways to use 301 redirects is to combine individual pieces of “okay” content into singular, comprehensive pieces of awesome content. For example, you might take posts about bee communication, honey production, and bee lifecycles, and combine them into a comprehensive guide to bee colonies. This excellent page will be better than the sum of its parts, collecting PageRank and traffic from all its constituent ingredients, and will have far more long-term potential.
- Eliminate keyword cannibalization issues. Keyword cannibalization occurs when you have multiple pages ranking for the same keyword or phrase. It’s a problem because it duplicates effort and can sometimes sabotage your ranking efforts directly. But if you set up a 301 redirect and combine those pages in some way, they’ll no longer be in competition with each other; instead, you’ll combine their influence and stack their ranking power.
- Consider purchasing a competing domain. If you’re looking for an advanced 301 redirect strategy, you could consider purchasing a domain that competes with yours. Once you have ownership of it, you can set up 301 redirects to transfer traffic and authority from those old, competing pages to your own site.
Do you need to set up 301 redirects for your SEO campaign? Or are you need of a more complete overhaul to your existing SEO strategy?
We can help. Contact SEO.co today for a free consultation!
He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.
