Good, Bad & Conditional Redirects
Friday, August 8th, 2008Whenever you make changes to a web site, one of the most important considerations should be how to use “redirects” to alert the search engine to your changes to avoid having a negative impact on your search rankings. Whether you’re moving pages around, switching CMS platforms, or just wanting to avoid duplicate content and PageRank dilution, you’ll want to employ redirects so as not to squander any link juice (PageRank) that your site has acquired. There are multiple ways of redirecting, and it’s important you get it right if you want the SEO benefit without risk of falling outside search engine guidelines (such as is the case with “conditional redirects”).
Programmers and sysadmins who are not SEO-savvy will likely default to using a “temporary redirect,” also known as a “302 redirect.” Unfortunately, such a redirect does not transfer link juice from the redirected URL to the destination URL. It isn’t that the programmers are intentionally negligent. It’s simply a case of them “not knowing what they don’t know.” Just gently inform them that what they really need to be using is a “permanent redirect,” or a “301 redirect.” If they ask why, just tell them “Because the SEO consultant said so.”
What would be some of the “use cases” for a 301 redirect? I mentioned some in my opening paragraph, but let’s examine several scenarios in greater detail… Generally speaking, if any of your URLs are going to change, you’ll want to employ 301 redirects, like if you are changing domain names (pontillas.com to newpontillas.com). Or if you are migrating to a new content management system (a.k.a. CMS), thus causing the URLs of your pages to all change. You’ll want to do it even if you are “retiring” certain pages to an archive URL (e.g., the current year’s Holiday Gift Guide once the holiday buying season is over—although I’d make the case that you should maintain such a page at a date-free URL forever and let the link juice accumulate at that URL for use in future years’ editions and NOT redirect at all).
Read more here by Stephan Spencer
