If your web site has old URLs that are not supported by your current site anymore, adding a 301 redirect to these pages will prevent it from losing traffic, and possibly even more important benefit its ranking in search results as it will continue to pass page rank from these links to the new pages. Here are some potential situations involving old URLs which you might want to use a 301 redirect for:

• An old page has been removed and combined with another page, or placed in a new location. – 301 Redirect
• Your product search feature was moved to a different directory or its URLs changed. – 301 Redirect
• A page has been converted to a different file format type. – 301 Redirect

301 redirects are also important because bookmarks and links to these old URLs may still exist in people’s web browsers and most importantly on other web sites (keeping your link juice!). If you fail to use the 301 redirect people who have links on there site or have you bookmarked will receive “The page cannot be displayed” error.

To install a 301 redirect, you can either use the “Redirect” page under the cpanel or edit the text-based “.htaccess” file. You might have to create this file if it doesn’t already exist under the relevant directory or subdomain; if you use cPanel, it will handle this for you. Here are some examples of valid 301 redirection commands which could be listed in a .htaccess file:

1. Redirect 301 /contact.htm http://www.example.org/contact-us.shtml
2. Redirect 301 /weather.php http://weather.example.net/index.php
3. Redirect 301 /stats.txt http://www.example.com/data/statistics.html

As you can see from these examples, the commands simply specify the redirection type and indicate both URLs involved. The filename of the old page comes first, and isn’t a full URL (because the .htaccess file is located in the directory or subdomain it was in), while the new URL is complete. You can, optionally, indicate a subdirectory as part of the original filename (example: /about/index.htm). Be sure to test all redirects after setting them up.

In addition to redirecting old URLs which are no longer supported, 301 redirects may be used to provide short web addresses that people can more easily write down or remember. For example, to promote a page with a long URL in a newspaper, magazine, radio advertisement, or bulk mailing, a short redirection URL could be created to forward users to an existing page. If only one of these URLs is used for each promotional method, it will have the added benefit of separately tracking how many “hits” are received.

Basically, the 301 redirect offers a versatile and convenient way to send users to a specific location when they attempt to access old, non-supported URLs. It prevents web sites from losing the traffic and search engine benefits of existing but outdated inbound links. It may be used to create brief, easy-to-remember redirection URLs as well.

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1. The 60 Minute SEO Website Audit