301 Redirection Vs Other redirection

[davikerkrish]

Hi,

I want to know the difference between 301 redirection and other redirection. Because i red 301 redirection is best for SEO. If so How? I am not sure how can i set the 301 redirection on my website.

Thanks.

[Darrin Ward]

Do you have a reason to do a redirect?

[jezza]

I've also been wondering about this after reading something about 301 redirects on this forum.

I launched a redesign of my site about a month ago, and whist many of the pages retained their urls, some were renamed, moved to different directories or deleted.

Looking at GWT I can see it is reporting some pages as having duplicate title tags (removed pages are still being indexed and compared with the new pages) and 404 errors for the pages that have been removed or moved.

Is a 301 redirect a way to fix this? If so, how does it work and how does one go about setting it up?

Thanks!

[joshz]

I've also been wondering about this after reading something about 301 redirects on this forum.

I launched a redesign of my site about a month ago, and whist many of the pages retained their urls, some were renamed, moved to different directories or deleted.

Looking at GWT I can see it is reporting some pages as having duplicate title tags (removed pages are still being indexed and compared with the new pages) and 404 errors for the pages that have been removed or moved.

Is a 301 redirect a way to fix this? If so, how does it work and how does one go about setting it up?

Thanks!

Yes, 301 is a permanent redirect code for SEs.
If you have 404 errors or missing pages you should redirect them to the most relating pages.

This is a great article on 301 redirects on various server configs and OS's.

[Jocelyn]

Friday, I decide to merge a small site of mine to a bigger one. Sunday, I transfer the page to the new target site, put a 301 on the old location. Yesterday, the old URL was still in the serps, and today, it's the new URL that ranks.

Figured I should post this really fresh test result.

[Adam Yax]

The effects we've seen over many hundreds of sites is that a redirect from one page to another is less of a factor. 301 Redirects are important for domains, or from a page to another site. But I wouldn't take a site or a page that has great inbound links and 301 redirect it expecting all the power to redirect into the site. Avoid redirecting whenever possible. If you've done a site redesign there are often few choices, the new structure has new page names, permalinks, etc. This requires redirects, but I'd rather create a static version of the page if the page itself has sites linking directly into it. If it's a page that happens to rank for a keyword, then redirect it, but if it has links going directly to it, do what ever you can to keep it.

[getis]

A 301 redirect is the proper way to tell the search engines that a page has moved. If you don't use this any links pointing to the old url will be lost. The 301 reconnects the old links to the new address so they will still count for SEO purposes.

How you create the 301 redirect depends on how your website is set up. If you're on an Apache server you can create a .htaccess file to do it. Search on Google for .htaccess 301 redirect and you'll find lots of tutorials.

If you can't do it through the server you might have to create pages at the old addresses and use some server code to send the correct headers back. Search for "301 redirects using php" or similar to find some info.

[Highland]

A 301 is a status code that is returned by your web server. It contains the new location of the requested page.

You can set them up by
1. If your web server is running Apache (IIS7 or later has something similar) you can use a config file in your website (for Apache it's called .htaccess) and tell it that when a given URL or pattern matched URL is requested, send them the 301.
2. If you have a programming language like PHP, .NET, etc you can have your program issue a 301.