Using 301 Redirects

The way a website is crawled it is possible that your site will have changed dramatically by the time it is crawled, and then indexed again. Very few websites carry the authority to be crawled daily. Every other site that changes regularly runs the risk of landing users with a 404-File not found.

What is a 404? This is the error page that you see if the page you are looking for is no longer present at the URL you followed. Aside from the frustration this page presents to users you are possibly losing valuable PageRank points. Any link that was posted to a Blog or resource page that could have been adding to your PageRank cannot do this if the destination of that link is a 404 page.

Any site can be affected by this but at particular risk are the operators of ecommerce websites. Every ecommerce site has products which are discontinued or not currently available and the usual solution to this is merely to take the product offline. However the result of this will almost certainly be that any shopping feed or personal link back to that particular product will result in a 404 and a loss of potential PageRank.

The best solution to this problem is to use a 301-redirect, effectively replacing the 404 with a permanent redirection to keep users (and PageRank) on your site. It is important not to use a 302 redirect as this is a temporary solution and will not channel any PageRank into your site. A 301 is a permanent redirect intended to act as a replacement for a removed or moved page.

There are various ways to use the 301 to your advantage. In the case of an ecommerce website it would make sense to channel the redirect towards a replacement product for the discontinued line, effectively maintaining the optimisation of the new product that was built up on the old item. if no replacement item is available then it is best to redirect to the category page that the item was in so that browsers can find similar products that might fit the bill.

A 301 redirect can also help you if you have redesigned your site or restructured it to improve your SEO strategy, often URLs can change while doing this work and rather than lose all of your additional PageRank it makes sense to preserve these redirects until the rest of the web catches up.

To discuss effective redirection and other SEO services please get in touch with SEO Junkies.