What is a 301 Redirect?

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect of website traffic from one URL to another. 301 redirects send organic site traffic and other referral traffic to a different URL than the one they selected.
The simplest metaphor for a 301 redirect is if you were to move house, you might set up a postal redirect with the Post Office. The Post Office will take any post that is directed to you at one address and redirects it so that you are still the recipient but at the new address.

Much like your post, you still want to receive your website traffic and you do your best to tell all your family and friends that you have moved, but people don’t always update their address book and your old address will inevitably still get that Postcard from Barcelona or that thoughtful personalised Christmas Card.

A 301 redirect is key to maintaining your website’s domain authority, SEO strategy and those all-important Google rankings when the URL is changed for any reason. 301 redirects also link various URLs under one umbrella so search engines rank all of the addresses based on the domain authority from inbound links. A 301 redirect differs from other types of redirect as it is permanent, as opposed to, say, a 302 redirect which is temporary.

BorG knows best… My thoughts on 301 redirects:

301 redirects are an SEO dream. All the time and effort put in to gain those lucrative Google rankings can be preserved!

I’d always advise hard-coding in the .htaccess file but the Redirection plugin for WordPress is simple and effective.Always redirect then submit the new page to Google direct via Search Console.

Beware of redirect loops and excessive redirecting.If you’ve noticed a drop in traffic or rankings then redirects (or the lack of) are one of the first things to check.

The ‘redirect window’ – If your website went live in the last week and the phones have stopped ringing, there may still be time to fix things with a 301 plan.

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301 Redirects in Practice

Below are two different URLs that take you to the same blog content. That’s thanks to a 301 redirect. That way, when people click on either URL, the URL we direct blog traffic to (blog.hubspot.com) retains the search engine authority associated with inbound links to either URL.

blog.hubspot.com
http://blog.hubspot.com

If you were keeping an eye on the address bar in your browser, you might have noticed that even though the second link has “http://” at the beginning of the URL, by the time you arrived at the blog, the URL in your browser read “blog.hubspot.com“.

This is the 301 redirect doing it’s job. It is essential to set this up so the domain authority from inbound links to the http:// address are linked to blog.hubspot.com to improve its search rankings.

Why Set Up a 301 Redirect?

There are a couple of reasons why marketers might set up 301 redirects:

Rebranding or renaming a website with a brand new URL.
Directing traffic to a website from other URL’s you own.
Switching from a non-www domain to www domain (as above).

In the first point above, when a brand changes their name, they will also have to rebrand all of their digital marketing efforts and amazing content! It is not cost effective or efficient to destroy their entire digital footprint and start over, so a 301 redirect is integral to maintaining their previous structure of SEO and inbound links from the old domain to the new one. You also cannot do anything about historic social media posts that contain your old address. In the second scenario, brands sometimes purchase domains that are similar in name or subject matter to their brand to generate more search traffic to their website. A 301 redirect is necessary to make certain that the brand’s original domain maintains its search authority in the process. As highlighted by the Hubspot example above, a lot of sites may have a mix of www and non www domains and 301 redirects can maintain consistency.

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What’s the Difference Between Permanent HTML Redirects and other Redirects?

As a general rule, a 301 redirect is better for SEO than a temporary redirect because it transfers all of the SEO elements that you worked so hard to establish directly to the new domain, whereas a 302 temporary redirect will wipe the SEO efforts clean. This will help the site maintain its search rankings and avoid any dip in search traffic.

There are a couple of scenarios in which a 302 temporary redirect is preferable to a permanent 301 redirect, including:

Asking for feedback on a new site design without impacting the live environment
A/B testing on your site to implement updated design or functionality
To direct visitors to a new location to consume the content when a site has issues

301 Redirect Mistakes to Avoid

When we understand the importance of the 301 redirect, we can start to look at some of the common steps in the process. then we can identify some of the mistakes that marketers make that could adversely impact your site’s SEO.

1) Set up a 301 redirect between the http:// and http://www versions of your domains (and https:// and https://www if applicable)

301 redirects point the power of inbound links from one URL to another, and although it might not look like it, the hubspot blogs are two different URLs. Make sure you set up a 301 redirect from all of the different iterations of your brand’s domain to boost your search engine results.

2) Don’t move to a new domain without first setting up a 301 redirect.

Back in 2010, the toy store Toy’s ‘R Us purchased a new domain and launched toys.com without setting up their network of 301 redirects. Their shiny new site’s SEO results fell through the floor because it was re-crawled by Google as a brand new domain. This means it missed out on any of the SEO benefits of their old site. SEO 101 should have told them to set up the 301’s before migrating the site!

3) In almost all cases, set up a 301 permanent redirect instead of a 302 temporary redirect, which may be the default setting of your website management software.

Unless you have an urgent and temporary need to redirect site traffic to a new location, using a 301 redirect is almost always the better option. So often, we see 302 redirects put in place to test and just left there. This leaves so many juicy benefits of SEO left unused.

4) Set up redirects to older internal links on your website.

If you do not set up redirects from old internal links, your site will create a very bad user experience almost every time for visitors who have the misfortune to click on the links. The site will take longer to load or show a white screen while it loads, or worse still result in a 404 error page!

Setting up a 301 Redirect

The good news is that it is really easy to set up a 301 redirect. In fact, it’s as easy as putting a line of code in the PHP header of the old site domain.
It will look something like this:

<? Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” ); Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” ); ?>

Want to know more?

Want to know about successful redirecting? Do you need any Digital Marketing tips, or a full-on strategy overhaul? Give us a bell and we can sort you out!

What is a ‘301’ Redirection, and When Should You Be Using it?