The importance of 301 redirects
January 24th, 2008 by Dan Roberts Launching a new version of your website can be a stressful exercise, particularly when so much of your business comes from direct Internet enquiries. The biggest risk is that you lose those hard earned search rankings and virtually have to start again. I am writing this post as one site I know very well has just recently launched a new version and experienced just that a large fall in their search engine rankings.
The reason I am sure is that they have overlooked one of the most important steps in launching a new site - the art of 301 redirects. 301 redirects are page redirects that tell search engines that URL’s have permanently changed their name and therefore to take the previous information held about this page, including all it’s incoming link value and most important search engine position and permanently transfer this information to the new page names.
301 redirects are a server side redirection, meaning that once a search engine (or user for that matter) comes into the page looking for a previous URL they are redirected to the new URL and simultaneously told to remember that redirect because the change is permanent.
Most websites are hosted on apache web servers and therefore the easiest way to handle a redirect is with regular expressions in the .htaccess file. The
To Move a single page add: Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.domain.com/newurl.html
To Change domain names:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*oldwebsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.net/$1 [R=301,L]
For some reason on our sites we don’t actually use the first command instead preferring to add: RewriteRule ^oldurl\.htm$ /newurl [R=301,L] for individual page redirects as well.
The $ sign means that this is the end of the URL, note the forward slash before the dot in the redirected URL also. In the brackets at the end of the rule the 301 states that this is a permanent redirect, while the L says this is the end of the rule. Note also for a single page redirect that capitals are important. If the URL is in capitals on your previous site then it must be in capitals as well and also note that you clearly need to state whether the old URL is htm or html suffix.
If you are dealing with a huge number of URLs that are to be redirected and they have similar names it is possible to not include the $ sign and simply produce a regular expression that is encompassing of a group of URLs, such as RewriteRule ^/folder/ /newurl [R=301,L]
I hope this helps, as I say, a popular campervan company I know of recently launched their new site only to experience significant falls in their search engine rankings, which can only be attributed to the 301 redirects not being done properly.
Tags: SEO, Web design
February 7th, 2008 at 11:26 am
If its the site I think (though could be totally wrong) - 301 redirects were in place. Thats sort of webmaster 101 stuff isn’t it?
The problem stems from when you introduce new competitive phrases for a different country.
While in New Zealand if you search google for “OZ campervan hire” the site I am talking about is 1st and 2nd ranked - though it will not be ranked well when searching from OZ until a bit more work is done.
February 7th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Thinking further - there was one major flaw with the 301/htaccess approach we had to take.
Initially the site was for NZ only - while the new version has a ‘global homepage’ and then splits into the two countries (each with their own homepages).
It was this new site structure - and the fact that the old homepage PR now had to go to the new global homepage that caused most problems.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Surely, if the 301 redirects are handled correctly though and internal pages redirected to the new internal pages there won’t be a fall in rankings only a weak performance of the new pages?
Especially if content in the new site is better laid out etc it should only improve rankings - as was the case in the Adventure Tours site where we have raced up the rankings further for our targetted keywords and increased sales in the first month by nearly 30%.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
That’s true - and while we had every old page redirected to it’s new version - it was the index page that became the problem.
Basically the new Global Homepage (an intro to both countries ’sites’) took the PR of our old homepage on the NZ only site.
With proper SEO on this page - results are bouncing back - with the OZ site ranking very highly.
BTW: What are these keywords for Adventure Tours?
To be honest it appears that there has been no / minimal SEO done on the site - unless you have some hidden method?
You know - the first H1 and P are the most important (not for an image and phone number), keep H1-H5 hierarchy, the keywords/phrases need to be on the page to rank, description Meta has a character count limit and on and on… and this really is just the bare basics…
Their only strength is the URL (great ranking for Australian tours) and length of time the domain has been up.
However - if you search for “backpacking australia” or “australian bus tours” (and most other search terms that people would actually use) - they are not even in the top 100.
February 8th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Andrew, the Adventure Tours Australia Group (ATA Group) has 5 main websites it administers for its various brands. Keywords and plans for each site are obviously specific and targeted to the market sought for each site. Needless to say I’m not going to reveal all our keywords and strategy for each. Having said that, I’m pleased you note “australian bus tours” as terms since Wayward Bus and Oz Experience invariably share the 1st and 2nd Google ranks for these terms even in google.co.nz. If you didn’t know, these are ATA Group websites. As you would know, quality traffic that leads to bookings is better than any old traffic and this has been the case for Adventure Tours.
February 8th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Hey - absolutely no malice intended here.
Just a weird (and brave) situation you have - where this is your companies website, you list the projects you have worked on, write about SEO/development concepts - and then invite open discussion (which will inevitably be from other webmasters).
I suppose I just get into my debating mode from the normal webmaster forums - where this type of review is common.
So having said that - always keen to catch up on webmasterworld and discuss - as I think my comments above re: lack of SEO core principles are still valid.
The other questions that would stem from this would be about where the 30% increase comes from (as we all know stats are only part of the picture):
- Was it based on the previous month (not really comparable in tourism) or the same month last year (and is this adjusted for yearly tourism trends?).
- Was it an increase in sales $ or customers (and have prices changed this season, have there been new promotions, more adwords spending etc…).
- Is the increase sustainable or was it a spike (what was month 2 like?) and so on…
Just the usual ideas that get bantered around - although typically the actual website is not discussed (which takes us back to my first point about having this blog on your company site).
BTW: Yes - I’m fully aware of the makeup of the ATA Group, it’s other online ventures and subsequent search engine placement.
So once again - I wasn’t meaning to offend. Please delete any of my ramblings where you see fit.
Take care