SEO Mentor

So I was on Sphinn.com today and found a blog post called “301 Redirect Explained” and was plesantly surprised to see something of this nature get to the top. Originally posts on Sphinn were more based on great articles like this that gave the users great content with articles that really brought value to it’s users (don’t get me wrong, there is still great stuff at Sphinn.com and I go there everyday). But finally an article full of great content that really gives value and education to the readers.

So I have titled this post “The long lost subject of 301 Redirect” because it has been a while since this subject has come up in the SEO community lately all it has been about is Jason Gambert (loser), Microsoft/Yahoo mess, Advanced Blackhat SEO, etc.

So getting to the point of this post I wanted to bring back the topic of the 301 Redirect. In the article posted by Ron Tovbin where he guest posted at Shimon Sandler’s blog ShimonSandler.com, he gives some great content with much value to help those understand in great technical depth what as 301 Redirect is and how it works.

Here are a couple things that I really liked from Rob’s post:

The new URL can also be 301 redirected, this is called chaining and should be avoided if you want play nice with the search engine spiders.

The 301 redirect is search engine friendly to some extent. This means that if a particular URL has “link juice” (it’s a popular link for some keywords) a 301 redirect should transfer the popularity to the new URL. From what I read in Search Engine Optimization with PHP (a fantastic SEO book for the technically savvy) this can take some time for the transfer to occur, so 301 redirects should be applied with caution to high ranking URL’s.

PHP:
<?php
header(’http/1.1 301 Moved Permanently)’
header(’Location: http://www.mydomain.com/seo_consultant.php’);
?>

JSP:
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.mydomain.com/seo_consultant.php’ );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

Javascript:
<Javascript (client side):
script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
window.location = “http://www.mydomain.com/seo_consultant.php”
//–>
</script>

The Javascript method is not a recommended. At some point spammers were using this method and, as a result, search engines are not in favor of client side redirection using Javascript.

Now these are some great tips that can truly help you take advantage of the 301 Redirect. He also mentioned the mass 301 redirect with using your .htaccess file and gave this reference for a good .htaccess file tutorial.

So the moral of the story is if you are planning on moving my site to another domain name you don’t need to fear you just need to do it in the proper way by using the 301 Redirect. Just remember it takes much longer for a big site to move and has a higher chance that there will be a shakeup in the search engines.

Don't Miss Out On Learning SEO!
Subscribe to the YourSEOMentor RSS feed or my email list below. Also start following me on Twitter. Thanks for Visiting!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 7:32 am and is filed under SEO, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: .htaccess file tutorial, 301 Redirect, 301 Redirect Explained, Advanced Blackhat SEO, Jason Gambert, Javascript, JSP, PHP, Ron Tovbin, search engine friendly, Shimon Sandler, Sphinn.com