in Chapter 63

Redirect

Whether you realized it or not, you’ve probably experienced the moment when you visited a website but you ended up landing on another website with different URL address.

You’ve probably think that there is something wrong with your browser or incorrect typing of the URL. But this is not the case.

This is what we called as redirect. A common practice done by the webmaster to move the page’s site visitors to another page.

What is Redirect?

Every web pages has their own unique address which what we called as URL.

Redirect is a way to send the visitors and search engines to different URL from the original URL.

It is being used by the webmaster for many reasons such as:

  • Change structure in the website
  • Deleted pages
  • When a website moving to a new domain
  • Merge multiple websites
  • Move content to another page

It ensure that the website visitors won’t end up in 404 page not found and replace it to another page that still live.

Redirect is not necessarily to be within from the same website, it could be from one website to another website.

Redirect in SEO

Redirect is a powerful technical SEO to ensure the health of a website.

It basically help the search engine to understand your site when a content has moved and whether the moved is permanent or just temporary.

Pages get deleted or become available on the internet all the time.

As a site owner, you don’t want your visitors to get the result “page not found” warning when they’re trying to access a page that has already moved.

With this, it help you to not lose any web traffic due to the movement.

In term of the authority, redirect helps to pass the link value.

Imagine that you have just deleted a page and there were bunch of authority sites that were linked to that page earlier.

When the page become unavailable, your site’s domain authority can get a huge bad impact as the backlinks value has gone.

Redirect solve this!

Redirect Status Code

Redirect have a 3 digit status code starting with number 3 (i.e 3xx).

Out of hundreds status code out there, there are only few that are being used for redirect practice.

1. 301: Moved Permanently

This redirect 301 status code indicates to the search engine that the resource is moved permanently to another location with a different URL.

When the search engine sees 301 redirect, they transfer the old page’s SEO value to the new one.

However, you need to think properly before using 301 redirect since there is no undo to it.

If you decided to remove the 301 redirect later on, there is a chance that your old page might won’t rank anymore.

2. 307: Temporary Redirect

With the redirect 307 status code, it tells search engine that the resource is moved temporarily to another location and it will use back the original page for future URL request.

Different from 301 redirect, 307 status code will not pass any SEO value to the new page.

Best Redirect Practice

When you deleted a content, it is best to always use redirect so that you won’t lose any current traffic or SEO value from the deleted page.

With that to say, here are some of the best practice to use redirect:

1. Redirecting All 404 Broken Link to The New Page That Have Similar or Same Value

If you think a lazy way to just redirect all the 404 broken link to your site’s home page, this is a bad practice.

The reason is they are still treated as 404s.

Instead, Google recommended for every webmaster to redirect the page content to the another page that is equivalent to the old one.

Find a similar content within your site and redirect that deleted page into it.

Or if you don’t have one, create a new one to prevent any lose traffic and SEO potential.

2. Do Not Use Meta Refresh

If you’re not familiar with the term meta refresh, it is a HTML that will direct the visitors to another page by refreshing it when they found no content on any URL.

It basically look like this:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://yoursite.com/new-page/” />

While it has the same function as redirect, but Google do not recommend this.

The reason is the search engine will not able to detect and recognize this type of redirect properly.

With meta refresh, you’ll still gain back the traffic from the old page, but you’ll lose all the SEO value since the search engine can’t recognize it.

3. Avoid Redirect Chain

Redirect chain is happened when you have too many redirects for one process.

For example, you redirected page 1 to page 2 long time ago. Then, few year later you decided to redirect page 2 to page 3 and forgotten that the redirect that you’ve done earlier.

This will create an infinite loop and produce the error.

redirect error

The best practice is to change the past redirect to look like: page 1 > page 3, instead of page 1 > page 2 > page 3.

So, always list down all the redirect activities that you have done in one place so that you can refer back in the future before you do any new redirect.

How to Redirect?

There are several ways to set up redirect in your sites:

1. Set Up Redirect From cPanel

When you sign in to your cPanel account, scroll down and find the domain section.

Then, find the redirect icon.

In the dropdown menu under Type, you can choose between Permanent (301) or Temporary (302). Make your selection.

In the next dropdown menu, choose which domain you’re setting up the redirect for. You can choose All Public Domains if you want the update to apply to all the domains you own, otherwise select the appropriate one from the dropdown.

Then simply fill in the page you want to set up the redirect for, and the page you want it to go to. Note that in the first box, you’ll only put the last part of the URL, since the root domain name is already supplied in the dropdown menu. But in the second box, put in the full URL you want it to redirect it to.

2. Use Plugin If You’re Using WordPress

Things are much easier when you’re using WordPress, that’s include how to redirect too.

One of the popular plugin for redirect is Redirection.

All you need is just download, activate, and start to redirect.

Fill the information for the URL you want to redirect and add the new URL you want to redirect to.

Final Thought

Setting up a redirect might not necessary when the website is new.

However, as the times goes by, your website is growing and the structure become more complicated. More and more new pages and URL is published, and you can’t avoid that one day, you’ll going to move or delete some of the pages due to some reasons.

With redirect, it help you to not losing any link value during that movement or structure change.

Written by Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at Search Engine Mentor is a team of SEO experts led by Gian Stavin. Trusted by over millions of readers worldwide.