301 Redirect Use Cases
What Is 301 Redirect?
301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another.
Redirect is a way for your website to send a quick message to your reader’s browser and tell them that the page they want to visit has been moved,
so their browser can automatically take them to the new page that you’ve set.
Cases That You Need 301 Redirection
Changing domain:
Let’s say you had to change your website domain for some reason (maybe re-branded your product). But you have many inbound links which is crucial for your domain authority; hence, your search rankings.
301 redirect is the way for not loosing these inbound links. It simply forwards the links pointing to the old domain to the new domain.
Having multiple domains for the same content:
Let’s say you’ve purchased several different URLs which are similar to your original domain and you want to redirect visitors from those domains to your original domain.
Why you want to do such a thing? Well, I can’t think of 2 scenarios:
- A common misspelling of your brand name (do handle typos)
- you have brandname.com and you want brandname.co.uk takes visitors to brandname.com
In such cases you use permanent redirect.
You discovered SEO friendly URL structures:
Let’s say you have a page with high quality content and you want this page ranked higher.
However the URL of this page is not very userfriendly and you’d like to change this. You can not simply amend the link. This page is probably indexed by Google already. Once visitors find your link on SERPs and clicks, they will end up with a 404 not found page.
In order to avoid this, you have to redirect the old URL to the new one.
In order to have a better understanding, please read my mini blog post I’ve shared some time ago:
Good URL structure
Many of us uses wordpress templates for our travel blogs and their default URL structure is often numeric based which doesn’t tell anything about your posts to Google. However you can customize your URLs depending on the main target of your blog.
If your target keyword is closer to your domain, you’ll have higher chance to be ranked better.
Bad URL examples:
www.my-travel-blog-domain.com/123.html
www.my-travel-blog-domain.com/2017/11/16/paris-tour
Good URL examples:
www.my-travel-blog-domain.com/best-restaurants-of-paris
www.my-travel-blog-domain.com/dining/best-restaurants-of-paris
www.my-travel-blog-domain.com/paris/best-restaurants-of-parisYou already have some ugly URLs? No worries, there are several WP plugins that allows you to do 301 redirects, no technical skills required.
Here are two examples:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/
I wish you lots of traffic!
