Learn how to permanent redirect your old website to a new one using 301 redirect command in htaccess.

Monday, 01 March 2010 15:39

Permanently redirect your website using 301 redirect.

When you move your site to a new domain you should always use the 301 redirect command into your htaccess file. 301 htaccess redirect is the best way to tell search engines that you move the website and its' not just a new website with duplicate content.

Using 301 redirect search engine will also know that the redirect is permanent. Knowing this, search engines will change the indexed urls from the old website with the new urls. Using 301 redirect you will also transfer the pageranks of the old pages to the new ones. That is very important, since a good pagerank is hard to obtain.

You should avoid using other kind of redirects for a permanent redirect of your website. Most of them are seen as spam by search engines.

How to permanently redirect your website using 301 redirect and htaccess?

It's easy. The only thing you need to do is to edit the .htaccess file and add a line into the code.

Code line:
redirect 301 /folder/oldpage.html http://www.newdomain.com/newpage.html

There should be no more than a single space between the code's elements.

Code line elements:
redirect 301 - tell the search engines that the page was moved
/folder/oldpage.html - you should type the old url here; folder path and file name, without "http://www"
http://www.newdomain.com/newpage.html - the path to the new file name.

If you don't have a htaccess file on your server, you should create it. Create a new txt file and rename it to .htaccess with no extension. Then edit it and after you add the code line, save it and upload the file to your server.

Your old page is now redirected.

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