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.

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