Have you ever seen the 404 error maybe even but hopefully not on your own website? What are 301 redirects? What is their purpose, and why should I know about them? If you are asking these questions you may have errors on your website that require an “address change” so let’s talk about how you can do 301 redirection to preserve all of the links & traffic going to a web page that you may need to move, delete or change.
Short Answer: a 301 redirect is a way of telling the internet (and web browsers) the new permanent address a web page or “URL” has moved to. Think of it as an online change-of-address.
Easy fix: There are several easy ways to implement a 301 when necessary either on the website itself or within your web hosting account.
Explaining 301 Redirection & 404 Errors
If you have changed the URL of a page on your site and have not updated with a proper 301 redirect the people who go to that old page are going to see a 404 error, which could indicate to the user that your page does not exist when in fact it does! Let’s not lose any of the value we have gained from a website page that has changed address. So what is the value of 301 you ask?
- Helps preserve link equity: Links, shares, and bookmarks of a page on your website are basically lost when changing the address of the page. The links, shares, and bookmarks pointed at that page will reference from the page address you (or someone else) originally used. Don’t lose the value that a web page gains from other places online!
- URLs on Printed Media: The website or pages that you create and print on other forms of media such as business card designs, branding materials, sales materials, etc. If you go changing the URL or names (aka addresses) of those pages or domain the people you gave your business cards to may be seeing 404 errors when they type in the old address.
Reasons for having to use 301 redirects:
- Complete website redesign when old pages are moved to new URL addresses.
- Optimization of website & cleaning up the website URL strings.
- When you move a web page or blog post to a new parent page or category.
Many business website owners may not even be aware that 404 errors exist on their sites which means they might be missing out on marketing opportunities and new sales! Missing sales opportunities that you are unaware of is a good way to create anxiety about lost sales.
So, how do I know if I need 301 redirects? There are many tools one can use to check and see if 301 redirection are required. Tools that can use web crawlers to discover broken links that are pointed at your website pages, and tools that can crawl your website internally to find any broken links. You may have internal website pages pointing (linking) to other internal pages that you may have updated, changed, moved, or deleted.
- Check for 404 Errors: You need a tool or someone like us to crawl your website internally FIRST to see if your website has broken links within itself.
- For WordPress to check for broken links within your own website, use a plugin like: Broken Link Checker
- For Back-links you will need to use an online tool like: AHrefs Backlink Checker
- Decide if 301 is needed: Based on the broken links error crawl results you will need to decide what needs to happen to those errors.
TIP 1: We can show you a special ninja way to use 301 redirects to increase your website rankings in search results.
TIP 2: Have you (or someone else) built some spam links to a page on your website by accident? This can be a reason to NOT use 301 redirects.
Do you need help finding these types of errors and fixing them? Our job is to help keep your business online and error-free!
Nexxus Designs
