In this arti­cle I will dis­cuss page redi­rec­tion tech­niques, what works and what to avoid.

Arti­cle Body:

Must read infor­ma­tion about site redi­rec­tion tech­niques, how it works and what fac­tors to avoid.

What is page redi­rec­tion and why you should use it in your site?

Let’s say you rewrite a web­page on your web­site, for mak­ing that web­page SEO friendly. As it make strong impact on theme of your web­page and its link pop­u­lar­ity fac­tors etc and you wish to insert key­words for improv­ing vis­i­bil­ity in the eyes of search engines and human readers.

Let’s take an exam­ple and elab­o­rate the topic

Let’s say the page in ques­tion is about free SEO analy­sis of web­site and I named it page5.htm. Then when I read text in that page and I found out that Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc use words or phrases in the actual file name as search key­words. Next time when i do a Google search after mod­i­fied my web­page mak­ing it SEO friendly, when I search query regard­ing SEO analy­sis of web­site in Google then I found that my web­site SEO Spidy is list­ing in top result. As mod­i­fy­ing my web­page and its Meta descrip­tion and I bold cer­tain key­word in it ben­e­fits me as top list­ing in Google. If you prac­tice same thing then it will ben­e­fit to your web­page too.

Ques­tions come in your mind about linking

You will have to point every link on your site to the new page name. If your site is small, then you can man­age it eas­ily but when your web­site is big por­tal and have 1000 of pages and pages are cre­ated dynam­i­cally then its major issue because more than 75 % make mis­takes like cre­at­ing dupli­cate con­tent pages, per­ma­nent redi­rec­tion not found, link rel tag not found, gen­er­at­ing bro­ken links etc. This will result in many fac­tors like your site may stay long in Google sand­box for con­tent penalty, vis­i­tors get­ting “404 page not found” error when click­ing on your links, demo­tion in search engine for many key­words of your web­site etc.

Let’s use the pre­vi­ous exam­ple, for a long time my page is page5.html was indexed by major search engines. If some­one types “Free seo analy­sis of web­site” in a search engine box, my page shows up on the sec­ond search results screen. But when I update it as Free-​​seo-​​analysis-​​of– website.html then it make strong impact as my web­site is list­ing top 3 result in first page of search result. This make a strong impact as search engine update my list­ing by cache it and remove obso­lete page5.html

Lost Page Rank (PR) issues:

Google devel­oped a pro­pri­etary algo­rithm that assigns a Page Rank (PR) to every page on the web. PR is a num­ber from 1 to 10 (10 being the ideal) and is intended to be a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of how use­ful and pop­u­lar a given page is. PR is influ­enced by many fac­tors, one of the cru­cial ones being Link Pop­u­lar­ity. Link Pop­u­lar­ity is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of how many “qual­ity” or “rel­e­vant” sites link to your page. With­out get­ting into too much detail, it is increas­ingly dif­fi­cult and time con­sum­ing to achieve a high PR for your pages, espe­cially if you don’t have a really unique web­site with excep­tional and highly sought after con­tent. When you rename a page and dis­card the old page, you also dis­card the PR of the page. Your renamed page will be seen as a totally new page, with 0 PR.

What is the solution?

I will start by enu­mer­at­ing some of the meth­ods used by the non-​​initiated.

Not rec­om­mended solu­tion 1: Dupli­cate content.

First thing that prob­a­bly comes in your mind is: well, why can’t I just dupli­cate the page and let nature take its course. In other words, I will have two iden­ti­cal pages, one named page5.html and Free-SEO-Analysis-of-website.html. This gives me time to update all links and the search engines will even­tu­ally index the new page.

But unfor­tu­nately this solu­tion is not viable because search engines will penal­ize my site quite badly, ‘think­ing’ right that I am are try­ing to scam them by using the ‘dupli­cate con­tent’ technique.

Not rec­om­mended solu­tion 2: Cus­tom error message.

If i could cre­ate a cus­tom error page. How­ever, I will lose rank­ings on the next search engine update as the file will appear to be non-​​existent. As dis­cussed above, it could be some time before the page with the new name will be indexed and will appear in people’s searches. Also, your web site vis­i­tors will be frus­trated by the fact that they now have to dig through your site to find the desired information.

Not rec­om­mended solu­tion 3: An HTML Meta redirect.

You could imple­ment a so called Meta refresh in a blank or cus­tomized page that has the name of the old page (in our exam­ple, page5.html) that points to the Free-seo-analysis-of-website.html web­page. The redi­rect can be instant, or delayed by a pre­de­ter­mine amount of time. The delayed redi­rect has the advan­tage that you can place an extra mes­sage, such as “please be aware that the page you are look­ing for changed loca­tion….. etc., etc…. you will be redi­rected auto­mat­i­cally to the new location”

In the past, this was prob­a­bly the most used technique.

With­out get­ting into the mechan­ics of the Meta redi­rect, which is basi­cally a META tag state­ment you add to your HEADER sec­tion, know that there are also JavaScript tech­niques that achieve sim­i­lar results.

What is bad about this is that this is a tech­nique often used by spam­mers to trick search engines and it should be avoided, unless the page is in a sec­tion of your site that isn’t indexed (also known as spi­dered or crawled). Search engine spam­mers cre­ate a page that is opti­mized for cer­tain key­words and phrases — it usu­ally has no real con­tent. The page is then picked up by some search engines, but when a vis­i­tor clicks on the search engine entry, they are redi­rected to another site, often unre­lated. Most search engines have fil­ters to detect this. Using this form of search engine decep­tion will see a site even­tu­ally banned or penal­ized by major search giant such as Google, Bing, Yahoo.

The rec­om­mended redi­rect strat­egy  — 301 Redirect

A 301 redi­rect is the most effi­cient, vis­i­tor friendly, robot (spi­der, crawler) friendly and search engine friendly solu­tion around for web sites that are hosted on servers run­ning Apache. If you are not sure, check with your host­ing provider.

A 301 redi­rect is just a set of com­mands you type into your .htac­cess file.

When a vis­i­tor (whether human or robotic) requests a web page via any means, your web server checks for a .htac­cess file. The .htac­cess file con­tains spe­cific instruc­tions for cer­tain requests, includ­ing secu­rity, redi­rec­tion issues and how to han­dle cer­tain errors.

The code “301” is inter­preted as “moved per­ma­nently”. After the code, the URL of the miss­ing or renamed page is noted, fol­lowed by a space, then fol­lowed by the new loca­tion or file name.

First of all, you’ll need to find the .htac­cess file in the root direc­tory of where all your web pages are stored. If there is no .htac­cess file there, you can cre­ate one with Notepad or a sim­i­lar appli­ca­tion. Make sure when you name the file that you remem­ber to put the “.” at the begin­ning of the file name. This file has no tail extension.

Some host­ing providers offer redi­rect ser­vices through their “con­trol pan­els”, so you don’t have to per­form low level changes on the .htac­cess file itself. Instead, they pro­vide a user friendly inter­face for this. Check with your host­ing provider to see what the opti­mal way to per­form a 301 redi­rect is in your case. I will con­tinue the arti­cle with the bare­bones solution.

If there is a .htac­cess file already in exis­tence with lines of code present, be very care­ful not to change any exist­ing line unless you are famil­iar with the func­tions of the file.

Scroll down past all the exist­ing code, leave a line space, then cre­ate a new line that fol­lows this example:

redi­rect 301 /folder/page5.html http://​www​.Seospidy​.com/​f​o​l​d​e​r​/​F​r​e​e​-​s​e​o​-​a​n​a​l​y​s​i​s​-​o​f​-​w​e​b​s​i​t​e​.​h​tml

It’s as easy as that. Save the file, upload it back into your web and test it out by typ­ing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be instantly and seam­lessly trans­ported to the new location.

Notes: Be sure not to add “http://www” to the first part of the state­ment — just put the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a sin­gle space between these elements:

redi­rect 301 (the instruc­tion that the page has moved)

/folder/page5.html (the orig­i­nal folder path and file name)

http://​www​.seospidy​.com/​f​o​l​d​e​r​/​F​r​e​e​-​s​e​o​-​a​n​a​l​y​s​i​s​-​o​f​-​w​e​b​s​i​t​e​.​h​tml (new path and file name)

The same for­mat applies not only to renamed files, but also to files moved to a dif­fer­ent location.

The 301 redi­rect is the safest way to pre­serve your rank­ings. On the next index­ing (crawl­ing, spi­der­ing), the search engine robot will obey the rule indi­cated in your .htac­cess file and index the new page name every time a link or its inter­nal data­base tries to access the old page. In the next update (again, this could take months), the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Some­times you may see alter­nat­ing old/​new file names dur­ing the tran­si­tion period, along with some pos­si­ble fluc­tu­a­tions in rank­ings as things set­tle. Don’t panic, this is normal.

What if your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server instead?

If you have access to the server, do this: In inter­net ser­vices man­ager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redi­rect. Select the radio titled “a redi­rec­tion to a URL”. Enter the redi­rec­tion page, check “The exact url entered above” and the “A per­ma­nent redi­rec­tion for this resource”. Click “Apply”.

If you do not have access to the server, ask your host to point you into the right direction.

In con­clu­sion, the best and the most trans­par­ent way (to both human and robotic users) to rename and move files on your web site, while pre­serv­ing your search engine ranks is the 301 redirect.

Related posts:

1. Google Web Page SEO Secrets Of List­ing On Google First Page
2. SEO Com­plete Solu­tion — Pro­mote & Earn High Com­mis­sion High Sales!
3. Google SEO Techniques
4. Short sum­mary of SEO strate­gies and secrets — Part 1
5. On-​​​​site and Off-​​​​site SEO