How to make your site Search Engine Friendly with 301 Redirect

301 Redirect

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It’s not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option. Also it is essential for SEO purposes to redirect your “domain.com” address to “www.domain.com”, I will explain why in the www redirect section below. The code “301” is interpreted as “moved permanently”.

IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
• Enter the redirection page
• Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
• Click on ‘Apply’

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>

PHP Redirect

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”);
%>

ASP .NET Redirect

<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(“http://www.new-url.com/”);

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers[“Status”] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.new-url.com/”
end

Redirect Old domain to New domain

It is essential to redirect your “domain.com” address to “www.domain.com”, because search engines will see these url as two separate sites, therefore your link popularity will be split between the two site and possibly get penalized for duplicate content on your site. To implement the redirect, just create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

How to Redirect HTML

Please refer to section titled ‘How to Redirect with htaccess’, if your site is hosted on a Linux Server and ‘IIS Redirect’, if your site is hosted on a Windows Server.

Test your redirection

You can Test your redirection with this simple Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker

Or to be 100% sure and see the redirection in action use the HTTP Server Header Checker. This tool will show you whether the 301 redirect is being provided by the server. This is what a search engine will see when it visits the site. The result should look like the following areas in red:

#1 Server Response: http://example.com
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:49:28 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.4.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.14 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
Location: http://www.example.com/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Redirect Target: http://www.example.com/

#2 Server Response: http://www.example.com/
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:49:28 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.4.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.14 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html