About 301 Redirects
Monday, December 3rd, 2007In your quest to attract as much attention to your Web site as possible, along comes two more terms to deal with: 301 redirects and canonicalization. Canonicalization is the process of selecting the best, most efficient URL for your site.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization
Put simply, a 301 redirect is a way to instruct a browser to a different location. Without a 301 redirect you can experience canonical issues, such as multiple varying URLs to a site. Canonicalization generally refers to home pages.
Most people consider the following to be the same URLs:
www.example.com
example.com
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp
But, are visitors to your Web site redirected to a centralized URL? This point is where setting up a 301 redirect is important for visitors to find your Web site. By establishing a 301 redirect, these inbound links go to one centralized URL. Many search engine optimization methods choose the www. version to which to redirect all links. This version is also more user friendly.
A 301 redirect is a way to instruct a browser to a different location. The code 301 is interpreted as “moved permanently.” Remember, a 301 redirect is the most efficient and SEO friendly method for Web page redirection. The 301 redirects are not that hard to implement and they should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, 301 redirect is the safest option.