301 Redirects – Best for SEO!

Recently, we made some changes to our website www.bytetechnosys.com where we updated lot of directory structure which in turn caused changes to the pages and their links.

Result – back links and pages in search results started throwing up a nasty 404 Error Page.

Solution – apply a 301 Permanent Page Redirect with immediate effect!

There are multiple reasons when you would have to redirect URLs:

• Your web pages may have moved but their old URLs may still be live in users’ bookmarks or in search engine indexes. Without implementing some sort or redirection, that traffic would be lost to a 404 Error Page.
• You may have changed the primary domain names as part of a company name change or a switch in the domain name to accommodate a more keyword-friendly domain.
• If you read the Google Webmaster guidelines, it clearly mentions that a site with www and a non-www site are both indexed as separate websites. Since each version is technically a different URL, to have both versions available for indexing affects PageRank, as it is being split between multiple sites. In that case, setting a preferred domain or performing a redirect helps.
• There could be some additional domains with catchy keywords registered by you. In order to capture traffic from these ancillary domain sources without presenting duplicate content to the engines and running the risk of being penalized a redirect is the best choice.

There may be many more reasons to opt in for a 301 redirect, but these are all that come to my mind as of now. If you have any reasons to share, I’m sure that would be a great resource.