What are redirects, Why we need them?
What are redirects, Why we need them?
Are you looking to change your domain name to a new one but worried of Google rank drops? Well, here is the solution. In order to preserve the website’s ranking and links in a user and SEO perspective, all you have to do is implement proper redirects.
Redirect is the process of directing both users and search engines from one URL to another URL. When it comes to search engines, we have to preserve our current ranking on that search engine.
Why we need redirects, why are they important. For instance, We re-arrange directories within our website, for example, abcd.com/products/winter to abcd.com/winter. The problem is that the old URL with an old directory structure that is already ranked in the search engine will be listed when a user performs a search on keywords relevant to your website. When a user clicks on that links they will get an error. Haven’t you seen error codes like ‘404 files not found’ or ‘400-bad request’? How annoying is that right?. So it’s very important to make sure that our website visitors won’t be seeing something like that with our website. Not just the above-mentioned case, but also in occasions where we changed to a new URL for some reasons and the users may type in your old URL, or may click on hyperlinked text points to the old URL, they would get an error page.
How does it work?
Let’s say you have a website with abcd.com as the domain name, and then you decide that you want to change it to something shorter say ab.com.That’s where 301 redirects come into play. A 301 redirect tells Google “Hey we’ve changed names. We have a new domain name, take all our existing rankings from the old site to our new site”, and they do that. Yes! they will, but it roughly takes a few weeks, but sometimes few months to fully kick in. But when you do, a 301 redirect tells Google that we’ve permanently changed. It’s like changing addresses. Like, you tell the postal service that you changed your address and they will forward all your emails to your new address. That’s what happens when you do a 301 redirect.
A 302 redirect, on the other hand, tells Google that we’ve changed temporarily to another site. Let’s say you have two sites. One is abcd.com/summer and abcd.com/winter. On summer you want to direct all your traffic to abcd.com/summer where you sell summer products and in winter to abcd.com/winter where you sells winter products. That’s where we use a 302 redirect.
So when you want to change permanently use 301 redirects and for temporary purposes use 302. These methods work in directories within a URL as well. If you want to navigate your visitors to different pages within your website you can use the above-given methods. Using 301 redirects is the best method for all removed URLs because it passes up to 99% of rank power into the new URLs.
So that’s all about redirects. If you are somebody who needs help with implementing redirects, Go ahead and check out the web design kerala
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