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In this short article I will go over page redirection strategies, what works and what to avoid.
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301 Redirect-- The SEO way to relabel or move files or folders In this article I will talk about page redirection techniques, what works and what to prevent. What is page redirection and why would you want to use it? Lets state you rename a page on your site, for whatever reason. Perhaps you chose to revamp your entire identifying convention, perhaps you chose to restructure your website and require to move pages into various folders, or you simply realized that you are missing important keywords. Lets elaborate a bit on the keywords issue, because it belongs to your search engine ranking success. Lets state the page in concern is about personalized USB drives and you named it page1.htm. Your USB drives page will certainly benefit if named something like custom_usb_drives. Now that you relabelled your page, you just produced a symphony of issues for yourself, for your users and for your position in online search engine results. Linking problems: You will have to point every link on your website to the brand-new page name. If you are heavily relying on visitors from search engines, then again, individuals will get a 404 page not found error. If somebody types customized usb drives in a search engine box, your page reveals up on the first search results screen. It will take time, in some cases months, prior to the search engines upgrade their indexes with your new page name. Lost Page Rank (PR) issues: Google developed a proprietary algorithm that assigns a Page Rank (PR) to every page online. PR is a number from 1 to 10 (10 being the ideal) and is planned to be a representation of how beneficial and popular an offered page is. PR is affected by lots of factors, among the vital ones being Link Popularity. Link Popularity is a representation of how many quality or pertinent websites link to your page. Without getting into too much information, it is increasingly difficult and time consuming to accomplish a high PR for your pages, specifically if you don't have a truly special site with extraordinary and highly demanded content. If you are merely operating a commercial site, in a competitive market (such as offering customized branded USB drives, as in our example), then it takes a lot of time and hard work to develop a great page PR. When you relabel a page and discard the old page, you likewise dispose of the PR of the page. Your renamed page will be viewed as a completely brand-new page, with 0 PR. What is the solution? I will begin by enumerating a few of the approaches used by the non-initiated. Not recommended service 1: Duplicate material. Thing that probably comes in you mind is: well, why cant you simply replicate the page and let nature take its course. In other words, you will have two identical pages, one called page1.htm and one custom_usb_drives.
This solution is not viable due to the fact that search engines will penalize you quite badly, believing that you are attempting to rip-off them by utilizing the duplicate content technique. Not recommended solution 2: Custom error message. You might produce a custom error page. As talked about above, it could be some time before the page with the new name will be indexed and will appear in individuals searches. Not recommended solution 3: An HTML Meta redirect. You might implement a so called Meta refresh in a blank or customized page that has the name of the old page (in our example, page1.htm) that points to the brand-new page. The redirect can be instant, or postponed by a predetermine amount of time. The postponed redirect has the benefit that you can put an additional message, such as please be aware You can find out more that the page you are trying to find altered place. etc., etc. you will be rerouted instantly to the brand-new area. In the past, this was probably the most used method. Without entering into the mechanics of the Meta redirect, which is essentially a META tag declaration you ad to your HEADER area, understand that there are also Java Script strategies that attain comparable outcomes. What is bad about this is that this is a strategy often utilized by spammers to fool search engines and it ought to be avoided, unless the page is in an area of your website that isn't indexed (also understood as spidered or crawled). 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, typically unrelated. The recommended redirect technique-- 301 Redirect A 301 redirect is the most efficient, visitor friendly, robotic (spider, spider) friendly and online search engine friendly solution around for website that are hosted on servers running Apache. If you are uncertain, talk to your hosting service 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 through any methods, your web server checks for a.htaccess file. The.htaccess file consists of particular guidelines for certain requests, including Helpful resources security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved completely". After the code, the URL of the missing or relabelled page is kept in mind, followed by a space, then followed by the brand-new place or file name. Of all, you'll need to find the.htaccess file in the root directory of where all your web pages are saved. If there is no.htaccess file there, you can create one with Notepad or a similar application. Some hosting service providers offer reroute services through their control panels, so you don't need to carry out low level modifications on the.htaccess file itself. Rather, they offer an easy to use interface for this. Check with your hosting service provider to see what the optimal method to perform a 301 redirect is in your case. I will continue the short article with the barebones option. If there is a.htaccess file already around with lines of code present, be very cautious not to alter any existing line
unless you recognize with the functions of the file. Scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then create a brand-new line that follows this example: reroute 301/ folder/page1. htm http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm It's as easy as that. Conserve 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 quickly and flawlessly transported to the brand-new area. Notes: Be sure not to add "http://www" to the very first part of the statement-- just put the path from the leading level of your site to the page. Ensure that you leave a single area between these elements: redirect 301 (the guideline that the page has actually moved). / folder/page1. htm (the original folder path and file name). http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm (new course and file name). The very same format uses not only to renamed files, but likewise to files transferred to a different place. The 301 redirect is the best way to maintain your rankings. On the next indexing (crawling, spidering), the online search engine robotic will comply with the guideline indicated in your.htaccess file and index the new page name every time a link or its internal database attempts to access the old page. In the next upgrade (again, this could take months), the old file name and course will be dropped and changed with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names throughout the shift period, along with some possible changes in rankings as things settle. Do not stress, this is typical. What if your website is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server instead? If you have access to the server, do this: In web services supervisor, ideal click the file or folder you wish to redirect. Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL". Get in the redirection page, inspect "The exact url gotten in above" and the "An irreversible redirection for this resource". Click "Apply". If you do not have access to the server, ask your host to point you into the best direction. In conclusion, the very best and the most transparent method (to both human and robotic users) to rename and move files on your website, while preserving your online search engine ranks is the 301 redirect.