Web Page redirection is used to redirect your web traffic to any page or website you need to. That will ensure that you won’t lose any traffic after you make some changes on your site’s link structure.
Why 301 Redirect?
301 Redirection is used to redirect your web page permanently. This is one of the best way to redirect a page which will ensure that you do not lose any traffic and page rankings. 301 redirection can be setup easily using .htaccess file.
What is .htaccess file?
.htaccess is short for “hypertext access”. This file can be placed in any of your website’s directory. It can commonly be found in website’s root directory. This file will enable your server to direct your visitors and or search engine crawlers/bots to perform specified instructions like redirection, authorization, rewriting URLs and blocking up IPs and or websites.
Why to setup a 301 Web Page redirection using .htaccess file:
For instance, if you have a page example.com/flowers.html and then you moved all it’s content to example.com/freshflowers.html page, you will sure lose some traffic if you chose to remove the old page. Though you can place a text and a link on your old page stating that this page has been moved, it is not recommended to do it since search engines do not mind your message. Only visitors who manually go through that page will land in your new page.
This can also be done, if you have moved your page to a new domain. Like if example.com/flowers.html has been moved to example.org/flowers.html.
How to setup a 301 Web Page redirection using .htaccess file:
1. If you already have a .htaccess file in your website’s root directory, download it and skip to Step 2. If not, you will need to create a .htaccess file. In order to create a new .htaccess file, just open any basic text editor like notepad or gedit if you are on linux and save it as .htaccess without any extensions. This will create a new blank .htaccess file.
2. Now open the .htaccess file your just created or downloaded and add this code at the end in a new line.
If you are redirecting a page within your website (consider your site is example.com):
redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html
If you are redirecting a page to a new domain (from example.com to example.org):
redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.org/newpage.html
3. Save the file and upload to your server.
Now test whether the redirection is working or not by entering the old URL in your web browser.
Do note that you should specify the correct path to the page you want to redirect. In the above example, I have considered only the top-level directory. If your page is inside a another directory, say “webdesign”, you will have specify the path like /webdesign/oldpage.html. And do not prefix http://www in your old page url. You must just begin it with / (this slash means your root folder of your website).
To sum it up, 301 web page redirection is best and safest way to place a permanent redirect since it will send your traffic to the new page and as well as carry the search engine ranking.
