Use 301 Redirects To Retain Your Organic Traffic

Whether you’re planning on moving your website to some other platform or thinking about site redesign, it can be a tricky thing. Migrating or redesigning your site may drop down your website traffic.

Wondering how? Well, when you change your website’s URL structure, you run the risk of losing organic traffic. That’s because, some of your pages with high-traffic URLs gets mapped to some new location. But, you can retain your organic traffic by implementing 301 redirects – that helps in keeping the structure of your old page URLs same (the pages that are driving good amount of traffic to the site).

This post will provide valuable insights on 301 redirection, and how it can be implemented on your WordPress web pages or blog.

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A Brief on 301 Redirection and Other Redirect Methods

Although, you can find three kinds of redirects named 301, 302, 307 and meta refresh, but 301 is the ideal one for use. Let’s have a look at all these redirects:

1. 301 is a permanent redirect and helps in preserving the “link juice (ranking power)”. 301 basically is a HTTP status code that helps to inform search engines about the older pages that has been moved to new URLs, and redirects your website users to your site’s new location.

1. A 302 redirect unlike 301 is a temporary redirect and can’t pass search engine ranking of link juice.

1. A 307 redirect is just the HTTP 1.1 successor of the 302 redirect.

1. Meta refreshes are a sort of redirect that gets executed on the page level instead of the server level.

Now it would be clear to you by now that it’s best to use 301 redirect, when you’re redirecting your old URLs to different URLs, in order to maintain your search engine rankings.

What are the Ways That Helps to Build 301 Redirects?

1. Using .htaccess File

An easy way to build 301 redirects is to make use of the .htaccess file that is present in your site’s directory. It is a search-engine friendly approach. Take a closer look at the following code to create redirects using the .htaccess file:

//Code to redirect a single page

Redirect 301 /oldpage1.html http://www.xyz-oldsite.com/newpage.html

Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.xyz-oldsite.com/folder/

//Code to redirect an entire website

Redirect 301 / http://mynewsite.com/

2. Setting Up 301 Redirects Using WordPress Plugins

1. Redirection

This plugin helps to manage any 301 redirects and also helps in monitoring 404 errors. The best feature of this plugin is that it provides complete log details for all the redirected URLs. In addition, you can know about redirection stats; that is how many times redirection have taken place, when it took place, who tried accessing it and more.

1. Simple 301 Redirects

Are you looking for a simple method that helps to redirect requests to your website pages or any other page on the web? Well, then Simple 301 Redirects is the best fit for you. It’s easy to use and comes handy during website migration when you are unable to preserve your existing URL structure. The plugin helps set up 301 redirects from your old WordPress pages to the ones stored at new location. And thus, the page rank of your old pages will be passed along.

1. SEO Redirection

The SEO Redirection plugin helps in setting up redirection, by using the various redirect methods – 301, 302 or 307. With this plugin you can also keep track of 404 errors and within a single click redirect them. It helps provide complete history of redirections.

1. Quick Page/Post Redirect

This plugin helps to redirect your pages/posts to their new counterparts on your website or to some external URL. It comes with built-in options, and thus you can specify redirect location, or the redirection method you want to choose – permanent, temporary or meta. This plugin is very useful for websites links that leads to 404 errors.

Let’s Sum Up!

In case you have migrated your WordPress site’s pages or post to some new location, and want your old page ranking attached to the new pages or posts, then 301 redirecting will certainly prove a worthy choice for you. With the 301 redirects the search engines will be informed that your pages have been moved to another location. In order to set up the redirects you can choose to edit the .htaccess file. Another alternative is to use plugins to create redirects. But it depends upon you which method you’ll prefer.

About Me:– Ben Wilson is a consistence and enthusiastic writer cum developer. His core hand is WordPress conversion services including PSD to WordPress conversion, HTML to WordPress conversion and many more. Presently he is working with one of biggest WordPress service company – WordPrax Ltd. known for providing high quality works to their clients.

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