Have you ever experienced missing important information that would normally be sent to your door after moving out? Mail forwarding is a crucial step to remember when moving house! It avoids losing valuable or private information that’s been sent to you. The same can be said for the addresses on your website when making updates and upgrades.
If you’re moving your website URL from the existing one to the other, you need to take the essential steps to send your visitors to the correct location. In the world of website development, this is known as 301 redirect. This is used when a piece of content has been “permanently moved” to another location.
As a digital marketing agency, Juicebox offers website maintenance to ensure that your website is up to date, and up to modern marketing standards. A 301 redirect is a key component to maintaining a website’s domain authority and search rankings in an event of a URL change. To end the week with a bit of enlightenment, our article today will cover the basic details of a 301 redirect, the benefits of websites using them, and how are they different from other redirects.
What is a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. They send both search engines and visitors to a different URL from the one originally typed on their browser or search engine results page.
Is It Necessary To Set Up A 301 Redirect?
At Juicebox Management, we do believe it is a crucial step to consider. Here are 3 major reasons on why set up a 301 redirect from our team of marketing experts:
- 301 redirects associate common web conventions with one URL that maximizes domain authority.
- To give businesses a chance to rebrand or rename a website from a different URL.
- In order for traffic to flow to a website from other URLs owned by the same business.
Especially when a company or product is changing its domain name, using 301 redirects is a high priority in maintaining the inbound link in the original URL that has been migrated to the new domain.
The Difference Between Permanent HTML Redirects And Other Redirects
Generally speaking for digital marketing and website development, a permanent redirect like the 301 redirect is better for SEO compared to a temporary redirect.
This is because 301 redirects would transfer the original inbound links to the new domain, helping the website maintain its search rankings.
301 Redirect Mistakes To Avoid
Now that the importance of a 301 redirect is cleared up, we’ll review the common processing steps to prevent you from making a mistake, major or minor, that will impact your website’s SEO.
- Set up a 301 redirect between http:// and http://www version of your domains. 301 redirects point inbound links from URL to the other, and although it may not seem like it, http:// and http://www are two separate URLs.
- Don’t move to the new domain before setting up a 301 redirect. A mistake from a corporate company to learn from – Back in 2010, Toys ’R Us bought the domain toys.com without setting up a 301 redirect beforehand. This caused their new website’s SEO to heavily decrease as it was re-crawled by Google as a new domain without the inbound links of the original Toys ‘R Us domain.
- In any situation, set up a 301 permanent redirect than a 302 temporary redirect. Unless it’s a temporary migration while your website content is being updated or being repaired, use a 301 redirect to maintain your inbound links and search rankings.
- Set up redirects to older internal links on your website. If you skip this step, you will create a bad user experience for your visitors when they click on the older internal links. During this event, the old internal link will eventually migrate along with the new domain and take several seconds or show a white screen.
Juicebox is Bali’s modern and accountable digital marketing agency, offering unique marketing strategies to businesses of all sizes and types. Get in touch with us today to discuss your marketing and advertising goals!
