How to Use a 301 Redirect to Keep Your Pages from Dropping Off the Face of the Earth
 by John Heard

Mastering the Art of Server Redirection - Part One
How to Use a 301 Redirect to Keep Your Pages from Dropping Off the Face of the Earth - by John Heard
UHaul

One of the most frequent errors webmasters make on their sites is...

They Move Pages.

Sounds so simple, right? Change a file name, move an article to a different directory, delete an image, or even something as big as changing a site's domain name.

However, changing any aspect of a resource's URL (without leaving a forwarding address) will result in broken links, broken bookmarks, customers landing on 404 pages, loss of ranking signals such as Page Rank and de-indexed pages—not to mention all of the lost traffic and revenue!

This includes changing any of the following...

  • Changing a page's file name, such as flower.html to flowers.html.
  • Changing a page's file extension, such as .html to .php.
  • Changing a directory name, such as /directory/file.html to /directory2/file.html.
  • Changing your WordPress Permalink settings, such as /2016/05/postname/ to /postname/
  • Modifying (or leaving off) URL variables that are necessary to retrieve a page, such as http://www.domain.com/index.asp?id=45 (where id=45 is a necessary variable).
  • Changing a subdomain name, such as www.domain.com/phpbb to forum.domain.com.
  • Changing the path or file name for images, PDF's, and other file types. There are multiple in...

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