Redirecting Pages Without Losing Rank
If you’re like me, there comes a time you need to overhaul your site. In my case, that almost always means some redirects, but I know that can undermine my placement with the search engines. So here’s a question for you: how do I move a page without tanking my ranking?
Say I have to move a page, but I still want my site to hang together nicely, without serving up 404 errors. Piece of cake, I use redirects: great for the user experience. I know my javascript redirect works for my users. Back a decade ago, I used to use meta refresh, too, and that was fine. But it turns out that years of online scams have made search bots very suspicious (if you’ll excuse the anthropomorphization) of meta refresh redirects and any other scripted redirect. That can only be bad news for my placement in the search results.
Well, it turns out, someone named Steven Hargrove has already figured it out. Written for those of us who have a compulsive need to modify our websites and don’t want to lose our coveted spots on Google, How to redirect a web page, the smart way shows you how to use 301 redirects and your .htaccess file so that any redirects you implement won’t stump the bots.
Three cheers for Steven. And for my web-rummaging husband.
By the way, the post is full of developer-speak, code, and other geekishness. If you don’t speek geek, just send the link to your intern. They’ll fix the code for you.
Seeing as how I don’t have an intern, I’m off to go do that update by hand.
January 3rd, 2007 21:55
Thanks for the info - always useful stuff when you are updating a website!