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Redirect Search Engine Friendly

In todays lesson, I’ll explain how to redirect pages search engine friendly with htaccess. Never loose pagerank and never get penalty’s for duplicating content and/or wrong redirecting again! Read on.

Introduction

I had a problem a couple days back. My blog should be moved from http://news.tikier.com/blog to http://blog.tikier.com/, but I didn’t know how to do this a proper way: a search engine friendly way. Of course, I didn’t want to get any penalty’s for duplication content or any other nasty stuff. I searched Google, and I found a interesting way to do this. It works fine and I’ll explain it to you in this tutorial.

Why not redirect via HTML?

Why should you use .htaccess to redirect? Why not use the simple HTML redirect? For the normal webmaster, the HTML way is much easier because you don’t know anything about the other one. It might be easier but this isn’t really true. Take a moment to learn and it gets even more simple then the HTML one!

So, why not use HTML redirects in search-engine-friendly pages. In the past, HTML redirecting was used by spammers to deceive the SE’s. This black-hat-search-engine-optimization trick is called Cloaking. As you all know, the search engines aren’t stupid and today a HTML redirect gets a penalty. Therefore, we are going to use an other and better way.

Explaining the 301 redirect

The redirect we are going to use is the so-called “301 redirect”. Normally, when someone visits a webpage they’ll get code 200 (green light everything is OK). We have moved this original file and we want the visitors of the old page to not see a 404 code (an error page). Because simply they will not come back. More important; the Search Engines are visitors as well and when they see a 404 error, they’ll delete this webpage from the search results. We are going to tell the SE’s the page is moved permanently and tell them its new home (with a 301 code).

Step by Step

Make sure you are on a Apache server, this method will not work on a Windows based hosting solution.

- Create a new file in the root directory of your website. You should name this file “.htaccess” (don’t forget there shouldn’t be anything before the dot).
- Open the file with a plain text editor like Notepad
- Add the following codes to the file:

Redirect 301 /old/directory/file.html http://www.website.com/new/directory/file.html

Explanation

Here is a small explanation. Redirect will simply do the redirect. 301 tells the search engine the page is moved permanently. /old/directory/file.html is the path to the old file. Do NOT use “http://www.website.com”, it will not work. http://www.website.com/new/directory/file.html is the URL the new page is located.

Conclusion

Now you know how to do this little trick. I guess it is even more simple then the HTML redirect. I hope you’ve learned something in today’s lesson.

Related posts:

1. 301 Redirect – The SEO way to rename or move files or folders
2. Eight Critical Tips for On-Site Search Engine Optimization
3. 7 Search Engine Optimization Strategies That Work
4. 3 Key Off-Page Search Engine Optimization Methods
5. 7 Free Search Engine Optimization and Writing Tools