301 Redirect is the best ways to let visitors and bot understand your address is changed. But few mistakes makes this whole process go awry. And very bad for SEO and the reputation of website in the eyes of search engine and readers. So in this post we are not going to learn how to do a 301 redirect when you have moved. But our focus will be how to make sure your 301 redirection is not nightmare for your visitors and bots. The biggest challenge with 301 redirect is its anonymity, you don’t know which link is not behaving properly and you end up screwing your search engine juice. Now how it is happening I explain it with a diagram.
Below is the Ideal case of 301 Redirect depicted in the form of process flow:-
Now in the above standard situation few things are considered like this 301 redirect is for a situation where in a home url of the website is moved to a new domain. The issues faced in this scenario are two:-
1. Redirection page is wrong due to typographical error or on the url without www not guided to reach the www. destination.
2. Redirection is stuck into infinite loop and the finally lands at page cannot be displayed.
Tips to catch hold of errors:-
1. check it yourself few of different urls on Google to check if they are reaching the desired page.
2. Second is by visiting your webmaster regularly to check for errors observed by Google Bot.
Second usage of redirects and which are used extensively is for redirecting the permalink changed. In the initial days webmasters have biggest trouble of getting it fixed by themselves. Now wordpress adjusts the permalink redirection by itself. But some traps which needs to be addressed:-
A. Putting in Slash at the end of the post name /sample-post/. Which fails even if you put in a redirect in htaccess file.
B. Redirection link from is wrong, which results in wrong code for 301 redirect. I am referring to 301 redirection code generation tool by Yoast.
C. Do take care of redirection code if you are moving from one hosting to another hosting. As in my case when I was looking at copy image of my website the 301 redirect created an issue in view and the migration engineer removed it and he and I forgot to reinstate it. And next day when I checked the webmaster it was a havoc to see huge number of 404 Errors.
Never use other redirection codes 302 or anything else, as they are neither effective nor appreciated by Google search bot. Always check such small things while your website has redirection codes. I hope now your 301 Redirect trouble is resolved? Did you faced any such troubles with 301 redirection. If you liked this post don’t forget to share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.
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