 |
An SEO view of 301 and 302 Redirects
|
 |
While both Google and Yahoo say they support redirects problems do happen from time to time. Never use a redirect on the home page of a site unless the site has been transferred to another domain. We have seen people do redirects from www.domainName.com to www.DomainName.com/Site/ more times than we care to count. The problem with this is the loss of page rank from the first page to the second page. Making this simple change could result in the Page Rank of the home page jumping from a PR of 3 to a PR of 5 almost overnight.
An example of a good redirect would be if you web server responds to both http://www.MyDomainName.Com and http://MyDomainName.com. In this case you would use a 301 redirect on http://MyDomainName.com to http://www.myDomainName.com.
This is important for the two following reasons.
- It will avoid Duplicate content Issues. The search engines consider it to be two domains and each domain requires its own DNS entry.
- It will consolidate your page rank. This happens because some people visiting you site will skip the www while others will use it. When these users visit you site without a redirect your backlinks could become spread between the www version of the site and the non www version of you website.
Following is a short description of redirect code and how the should be used with the spiders.
301: This is used to tell the spiders that the page has moved to either another domain or another url. |
302: Not recommended for spiders. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect to another url or domain. |
| Examples of implementing a 301 redirect. |
Apache using .htaccess file to move from on domain to another. |
Redirect 301 / http://www.MyDomainname.com/ |
| Coldfusion |
<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved Permanently">
< cfheader name="Location" value="www.MyDomainName.com ">
|
Redirect in ASP .NET (This goes in an asp file sitting on the server) |
<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.MyDomainName.com/");
}
</script> |
|
|
|
