11 April 2022

Understanding 301 Permanent Redirect For SEO.

By Rahul Garg

Have you ever noticed that there is a difference between the URL www.abc.com and abc.com? I suppose no! According to Google these two URL’s are different and crawlers take these two URL’s are two different pages. But then, when you type these URL’s, you end landed on the same page, how come? So let us explain why this happens. In the technical terms, this is referred as the 301 redirect and it is very beneficial in terms of SEO.

Table of Contents

What is 301 Permanent Redirect for SEO?

The literal meaning of redirect is directing someone to a new place from a different route or from a different path. Hence the 301 permanent Redirect for SEO and is used to redirect visitors from one URL to another URL. This redirection means that the site visitors and the search engines will be sent to a whole new URL than the one which they have originally typed. Let us understand this 301 redirect in layman’s language.

Let’s imagine you went to a grocery store one day to buy something and the other day you went you saw a board displaying that the shop has been shifted to a whole new location permanently and to do shopping you have to visit that new location. Similarly, this 301 permanent redirect works. Webmasters put a permanent redirect on their URL when they permanently change their old URL. This is an example of a complete take over where the detour page takes over the redirected page and also it will now possess the same qualities of the previous page without losing its visitors and page ranking (according to the Google’s new update for HTTP which is HTTPS).

How can you implement 301 Permanent Redirect?

Always remember that unless you mention the redirection the search engines will always take it as a 302 redirect which is a temporary one. So, if webmasters want to implement the 301 redirect that is running on the Apache servers, they have to access their server’s .htaccess file. After having the access to this file you now have to locate the .htaccess file. After that open your FTP and login to your website entering your credentials and go to the root web folder in order to access your .htaccess file.

Now you can start editing your file and make sure to use UNIX style instead of notepad and then you have to add a line which tells the server what it has to do. for redirecting a page add the line “RedirectPermanent /old-file.html http://www.domain.com/new-file.html” and for redirecting an entire domain add the command RedirectPermanent / http://www.new-domain.com/ and make sure that you have left a blank line at the end of the file and then your server will read the commands and 301 Permanent Redirect will be enforced.

Benefits of using the 301 redirect

There are various benefits of using the 301 redirect such as

When you permanently move to a new URL, you will not lose your page ranking.
You will not lose your daily visitors and your users will not experience a “404 page not found error”.
Also, you will be having the authority of your old URL’s in the new one and when you move to a whole new URL you will not be losing your followers and they will be re-directed to the detour page.
The main benefit is that this redirecting removes the chances of the duplicate content as when you redirect a page Google’s crawler will take it as one not whole two different sites with same and plagiarized content.