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Understanding the 301 redirect
It appears that usage of the 301 redirect is one of the most misunderstood tasks in SEO, mainly because it is something that is more geared to webmasters. There is also still some nervousness because the 301 redirect has a dark past and many do not trust how Google will handle it today. In short, Google is dealing with it extremely well so let’s learn by example and study the following answers to common questions. We can do this by asking a skilled SEO named Greg Boser who works in the trenches every day to get client sites ranked. Greg uses 301 redirects often and can even predict results within hours of success, nice!
What is a 301 redirect?
A 301 is an HTTP Status Code that tells a requesting user agent that the resource requested has been permanently moved to a new location. If anyone wants to learn more about Status Codes, the best place to go is the W3C.
HTTP RFC
Status Codes
Status Code Definitions
What are some good uses of the 301 redirect?
Well the most obvious is permanently moving a site or page to a new location. If you want search engines to understand that all current links on the web now belong to the new site/page, you need to use a 301.
301’s are also very useful when it comes to dealing with duplication, or website consolidation. An affiliate program is a great example. Let’s say you have 2000 affiliates linking to your home page with a unique URL that contains their affiliate ID. Using a 301 will give you the ability to tell search engine bots that all those unique URL’s are actually the same page. Having them understand that is a good thing because it helps give you credit for the 2000 links and it also prevents the bots from indexing 2000 versions of the same page.
A good example of consolidation would be dealing with a competitor acquisition. Let’s suppose you own an online pet supply site and you ended up acquiring a competing site. You aren’t going to run two sites, but you do want to make sure all the customers trying to get to the site you purchased end up at your site. A JavaScript redirect, meta refresh or a 302 redirect would all handle getting the humans where you want them to be, but they wouldn’t help search engines understand that the purchased site (and all of its backlinks) now belongs to you. Only a 301 will accomplish that.
What are some evil uses of the 301 redirect?
I don’t want to go down that road. 301 redirection is a very important tool when working on large scale technical projects. We do a lot of that kind of work, so it doesn’t make sense for use to explain to the world all the possible evil things you might be able to do with a 301. Abusive redirection on a large scale could have a negative impact on the quality of Google’s results. And that could cause them to change the way they handle 301’s. If that happened, it could have an extremely negative impact on a lot of quality sites that are using redirection properly.
Adam Lasnik from Google said the following:
301s are the way to go. PR *is* handled appropriately when 301s are used.
As for redirecting to not-quite-identical pages: do what makes sense for your users. If you had an old page about widgets, and you’ve deprecated this in favor of a more comprehensive page about *both* widgets and wudgets, a 301 can still very much make sense. We aim, algorithmically, to determine intent… and providing info that the user wants and expects typically suggests good intent :)
Is Google doing a good job with the 301 redirect when it comes to “intent” and “not-quite-identical pages”?
Your question implies that Google makes an attempt to compare the new page with the old before deciding whether or not “the juice” gets transferred. That doesn’t actually happen, so if you are someone who thinks that is something they should do, then I guess the answer is no, they aren’t doing a good job. It is also true that it’s possible to find some odd results that happen because of the way Google handles redirects.
You can see a good example by doing a search for my name. A page about Chef Pasternack has made it on to page one, even though my name isn’t anywhere on that page. That happens because some people used my name as the anchor text when they linked to my Pasternack post. Now that I have redirected that post to a page about the Chef, the body of anchor text that belonged to my post, now belongs to the Pasternack page. And those links combined with the level of trust of the receiving domain cause the page to show up.
With that said, I think that overall, Google does an incredible job handling 301’s. I’d even go as far as saying that their redirect handling has played a big role when it comes to their quality dominance. If you really stop and think about the number of pages/sites that get moved in any given month, you can easily see how not having the ability to properly track and credit those moves could have a negative impact on your ability to find quality sites.
I also noticed a few SEOs admit that they feel a bit intimidated around you when it comes to your web mastery but isn’t usage of the 301 redirect just good basic every day stuff?
I’m not sure about the intimidation thing, but the answer to your question is Yes and No. I guess the actual process of setting up redirects is something most people would consider basic webmaster skills, but understanding how those redirects impact search engines isn’t something most webmasters ever consider. And the problem is compounded by the fact that a human visitor doesn’t know or care what Status Code their browser received. Regardless of the type of redirection used, the human visitor ends up where they need to be.
Should we be working more and doing less blogging Greg? ;)
I think everyone who’s been in this business for awhile went through a point in their career where they spent way more time talking about SEO than they did actually doing SEO. When I got started, all that talking happened on email discussion lists. Everyone would spend hours writing brilliant posts that made them sound like a veteran with years of real-world experience. But the truth was, most people had the time to invest in writing because they didn’t really have much client work.
In today’s 2.0 world that career phase still exists. It’s just magnified 10 fold because blogging is a much more efficient platform. Now anyone who wants to get a foothold in this business believes that the way to do that is to start a blog and post something 10 times a day. The only reason I can predict with any kind of certainty how a search engine will react to things like redirection is because I’ve spent a lot of time doing it. That experience is something you can’t gain by reading and regurgitating. There are no shortcuts. So in the long term, I think that many SEOs would be better off if they would just shut up and get back to work.
Thanks for the helpful answers.
Relevant Links
Greg’s Wordpress Redirection Plugin
Matt Cutts on Moving to a new host
Vanessa Fox on Changing domain names
Apache URL rewriting guide
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July 20th, 2007 at 8:58 am
A very good summary.
The 301 status code is probably the most important HTTP status code after 200 and 404. A pity most people only know 404
July 20th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Yes indeed Tim.
August 4th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Hi, I just redesigned a site from scratch for my friend. The old site has been scrapped, and replaced with the new site. I did a check in google to see what pages have been indexed from the old site (site: abc.com), and there is about 30 pages in the list. The new site has the same type of content, just new page URL’s. Should I add the 30 or so 301 redirects into my .htaccess file to combat this change and try and maintain the page rankings?
October 1st, 2007 at 1:14 am
Thanks for the write up. 301 redirects are so important. I use them all the time, hacking away at my htaccess file. It is important to keep the visitors, PR and engines heading in the right direction, indeed 301 redirection needs to be understood by more webmasters that is for sure.