By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2011-03-02 02:14:16 | Word Count: 664
A 301 Re-direct is a search engine friendly way of moving your website to preserve your SERP rankings. If you have to move your site or change your file names, a 301 redirect tells the search engine that you have permanently moved so that it knows how to route user searches to continue to locate you. You may be asking, why is this important?
Well, if you are an online business, you have spent a lot of time and money investing in your site. You have probably launched a Pay Per Click Campaign with Google and are currently undertaking efforts to drive traffic to your business. This could represent a good chunk of your company’s marketing budget.
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If you have already spent money on generating Search Engine Optimized Content, Website Design, Syndication, Advertisements and Promotion—not to mention the lengthy analytical research that underwrites this stuff—then the possibility of losing your investment is very real if you end up having to make a major change that affects how search engine spiders index and drive traffic to your site.
A good example of this is a name change. Suddenly changing one little thing about your company’s name can severely impact your business. For example, a small change such as the one illustrated below:
www.careyourlawn.com
versus:
www.care4yourlawn.com
can cause Google’s spiders to send every visitor you’ve worked hard to cull through back links, onsite and offsite optimization and through more overt marketing strategies, to end up on an old site.
You see, the original URL has a page rank with the search engines based on all this effort you and your internet marketing company has put into it. The new URL has no page rank associated with it and is going to start from scratch in terms of ranking on SERPs. By using a 301 Re-Direct, you are telling the search engine that both pages are the same website, and that all rankings should be preserved and passed on to the new URL.
The same is true with a substantial redesign that affects page URLs or even if you have to delete a page. If you need to delete a page, use a 301 redirect to forward it to your “new” home page or the parent page it was originally listed under. This will preserve any old hyperlinks that led straight to that page, instead of leading users to a dead 404 (Page Not Found) page.
If you don’t take steps to identify the new version as the same site, you will lose business, plain and simple. You will lose all the credit your old site had built up after years of sustained effort. If your business is older, it is even more crucial to use a 301 Re-Direct for major changes that affect your URL. You could lose valuable return clients who can no longer find you in search engine results.
Don’t worry about all the redirections. If you use a 301 Re-Direct, your business’ rankings will be saved, your back links will still work, and users will still find you. For more information on how to do this or assistance, contact us today. Call us at 1-800-736-9618.
