The 301 Redirect to Fix Canonical Issues!

The 301 Redirect to Fix Canonical and Duplicate Issues!

If you haven’t already read my article about canonical issues, then follow the link to bring yourself up to speed for a better understanding of the 301 redirect. This article is an advanced SEO tip for those of you that have access to the “htaccess” file in the Web root directory of your website through an FTP client.

In this article I am going to cover two permanent redirect options… the first is a 301 redirect to re-route your WWW version on your domain URL to the Non-WWW version, or visa versa. The second will be a simple redirect of your whole Web site or individual pages, in which I will include a plug-in to accomplish this task if you have a WordPress based site.

The 301 redirect, which is also known as a permanent redirect, tells Web browsers and search-engine spiders that a page has permanently moved from one location to another. This location may be a page on the same server or an entirely different domain name.

The browser or search-engine crawlers are then immediately redirected to the proper location instantly. 301 redirects are the preferred method of redirection for search engines… by focusing all your links and traffic on one variation of your domain; you may experience an overall ranking increase.

We’ll start with the redirecting of your domain URL to either Non-WWW or the WWW version. To accomplish this, you will need to access your “htaccess” file from your root directory of your Web site. After you have opened the htaccess file, copy and paste the code below for the version that you would like your site to be, and of course carefully replacing “yourdomainname” with your own.

Once you have done this and uploaded your file, test your site by typing the opposite version to see if it redirects successfully to your chosen domain URL. If it doesn’t do it right away, wait a few minutes for the server to propagate the code and try again.

If you do not have an htaccess file, then we can create one together. Open any text editor such as Notepad. Copy and paste the version that you would like from below, name the file htaccess.txt, then upload the file to your server in the root directory. You will then rename your file to “.htaccess”. Don’t forget to put the “.”(period) before the word “htaccess”.

A Simple 301 Redirect Code to Move Your Entire Site or a Single Page!

Next, I will talk about the simple 301 redirect. The Simple 301 redirect provides an easy method to forward an old or non-existent page to a new page on your site. You can also move your entire site from one domain to another.

The 301 redirect is your best bet to keep your current search-engine rankings… once the search engine updates its Web page index, it should recognize the status change and update your listings accordingly. By setting up this redirect, your old site/pages or any incoming links will be seamlessly passed along including your existing page rank as well. Below is a simple 301 redirect to place in the htaccess file!

Below is for an individual page (place additional htaccess 301 redirects on a new line as shown below).

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yourdomainname.com/newpage.html

Redirect 301 /about.html http://www.yourdomainname.com/about/

This next snippet of code is for redirecting your entire old site to your new one… this code would go into the htaccess file of the old site.

Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomainname.com/

Note that there is no “http://www.yourdomainname.com” before the old page from which you’re redirecting; it’s not necessary. All you need here is the path from the top level of the web site “/” to the new page. However, it is necessary for the page that you’re re-directing to be a complete address. Also pay close attention to the spaces in the line of code, as they must appear in the right places or the code won’t work properly.

A Simple 301 Redirect Plug-in for WordPress!

The Simple 301 Redirects Plug-in gives you an easy method of redirecting requests to another page on your site or another location on the Web.

This method is similar to the 301 redirects that we implemented into the htaccess file where you would forward (e.g. “/about.html”) and the full URL of the destination (e.g. “http://www.sitedomain.com/about/”.) as shown above. So, you can not only forward between paths on your own Web site, but you can also forward to external site. Example: you could forward /video/ to your YouTube channel.

You can find the 301 editor screen under Settings > 301 Redirects in the WordPress admin dashboard after activation. You must be an administrator to edit your list of new redirects.