Posted on October 12, 2009 by Brett

You might have heard it before and are curious as to why it is important to have a 301 redirect. Well the reason it is so important is because without it, you may be losing a lot of the links that would otherwise be on your site. See what happens is, your website is either http://website.com or http://www.website.com or http://www.website.com/index.html. And in Google’s eyes they see it as 3 different websites. This is not good.

What you need to do is decide which of these names you are going to decide to go with. Which one is really a choice that you have to make, but I will explain why it is better to choose one over the other.

First you might want to go with which ever has the most links going to it. You can find out first if you are having trouble like this by running a report at websitegrader.com. Then use a test inside Google to see which domain has the most links. Use the search query of link:http://www.website.com and then link:http://website.com. Which ever comes back with the most links, you should go with that one.

You have to make sure that you understand what all the redirects mean as well. You would only use a 302 redirect if you are temporarily changing over the link location of your website. Only do this if you are changing the site around and want the bots to come back. Don’t let them come back over and over again with a temporary redirect. The bot will get pissed and start to not frequent that page that often. Just a piece of advice that you should know.

You can download a free tool that will help to see if you have any 302’s or 404’s inside your site that you need to fix. It is called Xenu Link Sleuth. It is free and a pretty cool tool.

When deciding what form of your URL to use, take this into account. If your web address is long then you might want to use the http://website.com. The reason is because it is hard to put the whole URL in places that take only a certain amount of characters.

How to do this

Basically you need to find the index page of your website and put a piece of code in the part of your website. That code is:
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/page.html");
exit();
?>

Of course you will need to replace where it says “newdomain” with your actual domain. Actually put whatever URL you are choosing to use in that part of the code.

This should help and in time you will see an increase in your rankings because all the links will be pointing to the correct domain.

Good luck and leave any comment that will help readers here. And feel free to social bookmark this page.