Understanding 301 and 302 Url Redirects

Its been a minute since I have written any content on AskMichaelHart.com since I have been so busy with my SEO internship developing content for AtlantaSharpCopiers.com, a blog created to help boost rankings for my current client, Southern Office Machines, also currently under redesign. (If any of you are looking to lease or purchase a copier in Atlanta, these guys have been around since 1985 and do a great job on customer service, fyi)

Anyway, I wanted talk a bit about url redirects. You may be wondering what the heck is a url redirect? Good question.

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding and the very similar technique of domain redirection, (also called domain forwarding) on the web for making a web page available under many URLs. (If you don’t know what a url is, it stands for uniform resource locator, aka domain name, aka web address, aka www.yourwebsite.com)

A web browser user might mis-type a URL—for example, “exampel.com” and “exmaple.com”. Organizations often register these “mis-spelled” domains and re-direct them to the “correct” location: example.com. For example: the addresses example.com and example.net could both redirect to a single domain, or web page, such as example.org. This technique is often used to “reserve” other Top Level Domains with the same name, or make it easier for a true “.edu” or “.net” to redirect to a more recognizable “.com” domain.

A web page may be redirected for several reasons:

* A web site might need to change its domain name.
* An author might move his or her pages to a new domain.
* Two web sites might merge.

With URL redirects, incoming links to an outdated URL can be sent to the correct location. These links might be from other sites that have not realized that there is a change or from bookmarks/favorites that users have saved in their browsers.

What you may not know is that a 301 redirect is moved permanently and should be seen as a link. A 302 found/moved temporarily might be seen as a link.

Sometimes you might not want a page to be indexed for security reasons. This can be done by altering your robots.txt file. You can specify noindex, nofollow, or noarchive. In addition, you can block affiliate tracking scripts via robots.txt by using -disallow:/afftrack.cgi.

Another type of redirect is the www vs the non www. Search engines will index http://yourwebsite.com and http://www.yourwebsite.com . This is bad since google punishes duplicate content. (Think of it as a nagging housewife that repeats the same instructions over and over )

The solution to better rankings is to include code in your .htaaccess file which is in the root directory of your website to tell the spider or browser to always redirect to your web address with the www included everytime so there are not duplicate pages and a lower search engine ranking.

The code is simple. Within your .htaaccess file you would type:

ReWriteEngine on
ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com
ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

It should not affect subdomains at all. Redirection can be applied to many duplicate content problems as well as other link issues. Redirection can also make links untrackable as links pointing through multiple redirects MAY NOT show up as links to the target URL.

Now, what if you have a broken link on your page and it renders a 404 not found page? Easy. Customize your 404 page with some content to appear so redirect people back to your primary category or related links. Alot of internet marketers use 404 pages to recommend related products on their site and have excellent increased conversions. You could also show a search box, sitemap, or link back to your homepage. Regardless, you need to fix those links.

I’ll talk about custom 404 pages in a future post.

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