Best of : 301 Redirect Tips

Have you ever wondered what happens to all those valuable backlinks and search rankings when you delete a page or change your domain name? The answer lies in properly implemented 301 redirects – the unsung heroes of technical SEO.

301 redirects function as your website's forwarding address, telling both browsers and search engines that content has permanently moved to a new location. More importantly, they transfer accumulated ranking signals like backlinks, history, and authority to the new URL. Without them, you risk throwing away years of hard-earned SEO equity.

In this episode, I break down four critical scenarios where 301 redirects are absolutely essential: when removing outdated pages, when restructuring your website's URL hierarchy, when standardizing your www/non-www domain configuration, and during complete domain migrations. The last scenario is particularly crucial – failing to implement proper redirects during a domain change has caused countless websites to vanish from search results overnight.

I also tackle the common question of how long redirects should remain active. While Google officially states that signals transfer fully after about a year, I recommend keeping them permanently. Even decades-old links continue to be crawled and pass value through properly maintained redirects. As I discovered at Broadband.Co.uk, links from as far back as 1996 were still being followed by Google's crawlers 25+ years later!

Want to learn more about preserving your website's SEO value during changes? Subscribe to "SEO is Not That Hard" for practical advice that helps you maintain and grow your search visibility. And check out Keywords People Use to discover exactly what your audience is searching for online – try it free today at keywordspeopleuse.com.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Best Of Episode
• 2:03 What Are 301 Redirects?
• 3:21 Scenario 1: Removing Old Pages
• 4:55 Scenario 2: Moving Pages Within Site
• 6:13 Scenario 3: WWW vs Non-WWW Domains
• 7:33 Scenario 4: Domain Migrations
• 9:55 How Long To Keep Redirects

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi Ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about 301 redirects and some tips on when to use them. What is a 301 redirect? Well, it's a status code that's sent by a web server to a browser that says the URL you're asking for isn't here anymore. It's been permanently moved to this new URL. It's a bit like when you move house and you tell the postal service to send all your mail to your new address. With a 301 redirect, the browser will take the new URL that's been given and go and fetch and display that. Search engines also use 301 redirects to pass ranking signals that the old page had to the new page, things like history, backlinks and such. This is really important, as these are signals that may have taken years to build up and in many cases, you don't want to see them lost. Now I'm not going to go into exactly how to implement the 301 redirect, as it can vary depending on what platform or web servers you're using. But if you google what software you're using for your website and how to do a 301 redirect, you'll find loads of guides for each combination you could be using. So that's where to go if you need to learn how to actually physically do them.

Speaker 1: 2:23

But the more important thing is to know what the crucial scenarios are that you'll be wanting to use 301 redirects for. Okay. So the first scenario is if you are wanting to remove some old pages from your site. Every now and again, yeah, it's quite common that you might decide you've got some content you don't want on the site anymore and you're just going to delete it. Now you could just delete it. But then if that site, if that page that you're removing, has got any backlinks from an external site and you've got any other internal links that are pointing there, those links are going to become dead links and you don't want to lose the power of those links. You don't want to lose any equity in those links. So if you put a 301 redirect from the page that you've removed to the next most suitable page now an example would be if you've got a product to an e-commerce store that you don't, you no longer stock and you know you use no value and keep it on the site anymore, then you would 301 redirect that products page to the category page that product belongs to. That. That would be the next most sensible place to redirect that to. Other times it might be that your home page might be the most sensible page to redirect to, but you basically just got to look and find the page that most suits what that topic was about to redirect to, and quite often it's just the parent topic. By doing this redirect, it will mean that no one ever visiting that URL will go to a 404 page, sort of an error page that was sent to the most the next most sensible page to go to, and it also means that Google will be able to pass any sort of incorrect history onto the page that you 301 redirected to.

Speaker 1: 4:03

The second scenario where you'd want to use a 301 redirect is if you are not deleting a page but actually just moving it to another part on your website. So, for example, you just want to change its actual URL. Now we did this on broadbandcouk because when we introduced topical clusters on broadbandcouk about 10 years ago, we got lots of pages that were on URLs that didn't match the new URL structure we were putting in for those topical clusters. So we used 301 redirects to move the pages within the URL hierarchy so that our URL structure was a lot cleaner and a lot more semantically fresh to each other. So that's another reason for if you're moving content around within a site, it's not something I would suggest you do lightly, because with Thrill and redirects there is sometimes a bit of a lag between the signals to pass over. In our case, you know we didn't really spot much many problems with that on broadbandcouk, but it's just something to watch for. But yeah, that's where, if you're moving and rearranging your content into more logical silos and clusters, you might want to use a 301 redirect to change the actual URL on site of a piece of content.

Speaker 1: 5:21

The third scenario where you'd want to use a 301 redirect is where you may have your site available on wwwdomainnamecom and just domain namecom, and that's quite common people. When they're doing the setups they don't set it up in a way where one redirects to the other. It's really important to just have one canonical version, so it doesn't matter which it is. You can choose the www version or just the plain domain name version. But make sure you've got a 301 redirect in place so that if anyone goes to the one that isn't the canonical version it will forward them through. So if they type in domainnamecom, it will 301 redirect them to the www version. Or if you just want to have the plain domain name without a www version, if they type in wwwdomainname, it will 301 redirect them. And those kind of 301 redirects can be made with wildcards so that any URL that they've got past the domain name will also 301 redirect. So it does a catch-all, so that anyone going to the www version or the non-www version gets redirected in the right way that you want them to.

Speaker 1: 6:34

The fourth scenario I want to cover today is the one where you transfer and migrate all your content from one domain name to another. So say, for example, you decide to rebrand your company or your website and you get a whole brand new domain and you're going to move all your content across to that new domain. It's really, really important to put in a 301 redirect from all the urls from the old domain to the urls on the new domain, so that google knows that, oh yeah, you've literally just changed from one domain to another, and to pass over all the domain history, all the link history, all the equity that's been built up from the old domain and the URLs to the new domain and its URLs. If you don't do this 301, then as far as Google's concerned, it's a brand new website. It's got no backlinks, no history, it doesn't know anything about it and you're just going to destroy your rankings. It's the most common way of people just completely get it wrong. If they just move to a new domain, don't think about this, don't do a 301 and then wonder where all the traffic disappears to. So it's really important to, if you're doing a domain migration, to use 301 redirects from the old domain to the new domain.

Speaker 1: 7:41

The question I'm commonly asked is how long should we keep 301 redirects in place for? And I'd say keep them in forever. The line from Google is they say that after one year, then all ranking signals are mean signals from the old page are permanently transferred to the new page. But I will, personally, would just keep them in forever. I say this because when we had broadband at Codeuk, I used to look at the server logs and we had links that went back well, I mean they went back before 1996, because it was a very old domain and there were some links external links that were to pages that hadn't existed for many, many years. These were pages from when the website was a web agency, before broadband became a thing. If you want to know more about that, go and listen to the episode I did about the story of broadbandcouk. But there was links to pages for when it was a web agency and those links still existed online on external sites and Google would still crawl them. We'd see Googlebot in the logs crawling and following these old links, even though they were 25 plus years old in some cases. So we still wanted to keep that link equity and so that's why we kept the 301s in. So hopefully that's given you an overview of what a 301 Redirector is when you'd want to use them, why they're important. And I say, if you want to learn how to actually implement them, I'd go and Google for your specific platform, website and web server and how to do it, and you'll find loads of great guides out there on how to actually implement them in there for real.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard is brought to you by keywords people use. Calm. These solutions. Find the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywords people usecom. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I might at channel 5, on twitter, or you can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.