Redirects serve as pathways that route web traffic from one URL to a different one. These can be internal (within the same website) or external (leading to another website).
In this discussion, our focus is on internal redirects. Although they’re simple to set up, incorrect applications can jeopardize your SEO, potentially causing ranking drops. Gulp!
301’s are important HTTP status codes
URL redirection operates through server responses with HTTP status codes. A 200 status indicates a successful request (Boom, you are there!). But if a server wishes to guide a user to a different page, it sends a 30x status with a new target URL. The browser then makes a fresh request to this new address.
This method is called server-side HTTP redirection, which is the most prevalent type, but there’s also client-side redirection, which is less frequent and slower.
Server-side redirection occurs during request processing, while client-side redirects happen after some or all of the page has loaded. Since the server side is faster, it’s often the preferred choice. Yet, if you lack server configuration control, client-side remains an option.
URL redirection can be either temporary or permanent. The various types include:
- HTTP 301 (permanent move): Indicates a permanent relocation and helps transfer SEO value from the old to the new page.
- HTTP 302 (temporary move): Useful for marketing but can impact SEO as the original URL remains indexed.
- HTTP 303 (see another location): Temporary redirection primarily for form submissions.
- HTTP 307 & 308: Similar to 302 and 301, respectively, but are technically cleaner.
You can also encounter client-side redirects like Meta Refresh (HTML-based), JavaScript redirect, and Crypto redirect (unrelated to cryptocurrency).
Why are redirects important?
The simple answer is that you need to give direction to users and search robots on where content has been moved to. It should be automated, allowing a great User Experience while protecting those amazing rankings you’ve built up.
Rankings? How so?
In this episode of the Perfect Afternoon Morning Show podcast, we discuss how redirects are like filing a “forwarding of mail” or “change of address” with the Post Office. They need to know where to send your mail as you’ve been established at an address. So your awesome content on your website has an address too. Like this blog post (check the URL above), a specific address will be listed in a sitemap and referenced to come and crawl or “acknowledge” by Google, Bing, and others.
If during a rebuild, website refresh, content audit, or relaunch, you make changes to directory structures, categories, or page names, you’ll want to write out the “redirects” to let any bot coming to your website know where that content lives.
It’s a process that can save time if you do it correctly. A snazzy SEO agency can help guide you through.
Do redirects matter in SEO?
For SEO, this is super-duper important. If you built up traffic from that content and have inbound links you’ll want to pass that “juice” to the new pages.
Identifying internal redirects requires third-party tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Ahref. There are monitoring tools for WordPress that will tell you if links are broken and allow you to fix them. Two that we are a big fan of are Redirection and Yoast Premium.
Be wary of common mistakes, such as redirecting to unrelated content, creating redirect chains, or incorrectly applying temporary redirects. Moreover, ensure to audit your redirects to prevent any SEO pitfalls regularly.
301 redirects in a website rebuild
Establishing this for a website relaunch is an important part of the process. You’ll want to crawl the entire website and get a list of URLs for the old website. Using Google Sheets, place that that has three columns: old, new, and redirect type. You probably see where I am going now: Old gets the old website URLs, new gets the new URLs that have changed, and in the third column, you tell the developer what type or redirect you want.
For tools like Redirection and Yoast, they have friendly interfaces that make this easy to do. Best of all, they monitor traffic live and tell you if the broken page is actually being visited or “pinged” and where it is redirected to. So it’s easy to make a change right on your website.
For a relaunch, this is part of the pre-launch process. Yes, it can take some time and be tedious; however, it’ll be worth it to your end users, and saving backlink juice to your pages can be priceless.
Remember redirects are essential when:
- Deleting a page but wanting to maintain its traffic.
- Redesigning site structure.
- Merging websites.
- Marketing campaigns.
- Correcting typos or errors.
Redirectors can enhance user experience, control indexing, and preserve PageRank when executed correctly. However, errors can lead to lost link equity, reduced traffic, wasted crawl budget, and poor user experience.
Photo Credit: Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels
