What is a 301 redirect and how does it affect seo ranking?

When I moved from my previous home, I went to the post office and filled out a form called a change of address. This task was very important because if I didn’t fill out this form, my mail would not be forwarded to my new address.  One very important feature of the postal change of address is that senders were notified of my new address so the sender’s records could be updated.

A 301 redirect works in a very similar way.  It is a search engine friendly permanent change of address for your website or web page.  Whenever a visitor goes to the old address or page, my website would automatically redirects him/her to my site’s new address.  When a search engine visits and is redirected by a 301 redirect, it updates various bits of information.

For us humans, we forget to update our address book. Not a problem.  The 301 redirect is there and ready to go into action redirecting for you.

Proper redirection is very important from a SEO perspective.  If you simply change the link, your history may be gone forever. With proper redirection, you retain the rankings history you enjoyed before making the change in your site.

Redirection is good for other purposes.  When Google is presented with two domain links pointing to the same page, rankings for that page may suffer.  A perfect example is http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com. The 301 redirect will tell Google to combine them into one ranking, thus giving your site an overall higher ranking.

Sometimes we need to make a change in the URL of a specific page.  If the page is brand new, it’s no big deal if there is no history.  If very old, then that is an issue.

A very useful WordPress plug-in is the ‘redirection’ plug-in.  Whenever you make the decision to change the link, a redirect is automatically created. All link history is retained! This feature is built right into Magento ecommerce.

When your SEO consultant arrives to improve your inbound marketing, you don’t want him to lose all your link history. Make certain he includes this very important task of 301 redirect on his list of services.