301 Redirects and SEO

I am sure you all know the “404 message” or the “Page Not Find” page. You will see this a lot of the times. You can read a lot more about 404 messages here.

Typical you will get the “page not find” when

• Maybe you have moved a page, that can still be found in the search engines.
• Maybe your visitor have typed in a wrong URL
• Maybe they have clicked on a broken link within your website (you can do something about that right)

And I wrote to you that you should optimize your 404 page.

So what is a 301 page?

When you are changing your website or blog. Your page will change adresse. And suddenly your customers and the search engines can’t find your page. Normally you will get a 404 page. But with a 301 redirect instruction you can send the customers to the right page – or an alternative page. If the orginale page was deleted.

Maybe you are selling used cars. And the car on the page has been sold – so you have deleted the page. But the reference with the link is still out in the search engines. So you need to make a redirect.

So when you redesign or moved pages remember to use the 301 permanent redirects so you don’t have to get started all over. You will keep your ranking in the search engines. Awesome right?

So when to use a 301 permanent redirect

1. If you have only website. If you 2 address but only 1 website. Like me I have www.SeoCustomer.com but also SeoCustomer.com. I will need to fix this so there is only one website available. I think I will pick www.SeoCustomer.com and make a redirect of the other one.
2. Get more link juice (Duplicate Content). If half the incoming links are linking to www.SeoCustomer.com and the other half is linking to SeoCustomer.com each page will only get half the juice. So I am spreading out my links. I need all the links to only one page. And get the double juice.
3. Domain change. If I decided to change my domain name to CustomerNow.com all the work I have been doing to get my links out has been wasted. So if I did that I would surely need a redirect. It will tell the search engines that my pages are still out there and I will keep my ranking.
4. Multiple Domain Names. A lot of companies buy other domain names to protect their product or brand. So instead of just lead the people to a dead end, its much better to redirect them to your active website.

Enjoy your day out there… take care

Henrik