301 redirect plays a significant role in the health of your site. Please read this article to learn the essentials of using the 301 and find tips and tricks from our team of SEO experts.
What is a 301 redirect?
The 301 redirect is a way to send website visitors to an active URL when the previously desired one has been removed. A redirect should point to a relevant or similar live page that is no longer wanted. This ensures the best user experience for the visitor and means that each backlink value is correctly aligned and does not get lost on the previous page.
For example, if you go through your URLs and find a URL like https://www.example.com/old1234.html, you probably want to clean it up so that a 301 redirect can send visitors from that page to a page. Own https://www.example.com/new.
This will prevent someone from going to the previous page, and any site that links to the previous page will now pass the link’s value to the new page. Even after redirecting a page, you must update the backlinks on other websites to point directly to the new page. This confirms that the total value of the link has been transmitted.
What does the reference “301” mean?
301 redirects can appear as “301” or “301 permanently moved”. An HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) response status code indicates the response from the server hosting the page to the browsers that requested the URL. 301 status codes are not inherently bad. They indicate that the requested page has been sent to another page. This is the one providing by the browser.
A 301 reply may mean keeping your site-building tidy and stopping visitors from mooring on irrelevant, old, or damaged pages.
When your site server “serves” a web page for a visitor (human or search engine) to your website, it also includes a status code on the web page in your mind. This information is “delivered” before the page’s actual content and tells your browser what the page contains, that is, an image, HTML, PDF, video, etc., which is used to inform visitors or the search engine “status” of the page.
The “301” status code is one of many HTTP replies that tell us and the search engines what is happening to this URL. The HTTP reply status code “301” means that this URL has been enduringly moved. This means that somewhat link to the old URL must be redirected to the new URL provided.
When to use 301 redirects?
301 redirects should use when a page is no longer relevant, sound, or deleted. They are also very useful for rebuilding websites with neat URLs on the newest and cleanest pages. It is very important to redirect old URLs, which will not stay the same when you rebuild your website.
Use case:
Clean up dynamic URLs and redirect them to shorter, search engine-friendly versions.
Prevention of duplicate content issues; For example, if you have written multiple blogs on the same topic and want to consolidate them into one super blog post
SEO benefits of 301 redirects
301 redirects are imperative for search engine optimization and can be the difference between successful and unsuccessful website building. They can be helpful in several ways:
Link equity:
301 is the favored choice for 3xx redirects for SEO because it has been proven that around 90% of the link equity can be transferred from the redirected page. This is less likely with temporary 302 redirects. Therefore, search engines may not pass the link’s value to forward it to the new URL.
Remove old URLs after a search engine index
If a search engine encounters a 301 redirect while crawling your website, it will need to remove the old URL from its index and replace it with the new one. This means that the new page should ultimately return the previous page in the search engine index. The above URL will redirect human visitors to the unique URL when someone tries to access it during this time.
If you do not usage a 301 redirect when deleting a page from your website, search engines will display a 404 Not Found error response code, which could potentially cause the page to be deleted entirely from your website.
