Changing URL’s & Good SEO Practice with 301 Redirects

Why use 301 redirects

On a number of occasions I have had to convert a static html website into a WordPress based content management system (CMS).

The way that Google works is that it will index your pages on your website by their URL / file name, eg websites.html. All the search engine optimsiation (SEO) is associated with that URL page.

If you go and change the page file name from websites.html to good-websites.html then when Google shows your website page in the search results it will send you to the page indexed (URL) for websites.html.

So when you go to view the page you will find normally a 404 error, that page websites.html cannot be found. For the simple reason that page no longer exists as it has been renamed to good-websites.html.

In time Google will sniff the new page out but to help maintain SEO credibility you can use 301 redirects to inform Google that  websites.html. is now called good-websites.html, the URL has changed for that page file.

Creating a redirect on Apache servers

Add the following to the .htaccess for static sites and CMS based websites.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.mysite.com/newpage.html
Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.mysite.com/overhere/

301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances:

• You’ve moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.
• You’re merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages.