WordPress 301 Redirect: Tips and Techniques
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There are several instances when you administer WordPress blogs where you will need to perform a 301 redirect. It is one of the most important corrective actions you can take when moving content. No other methods are as friendly to search engines, but it must be done correctly. This article will explain how.
Other methods, such as doing a temporary redirect (302), using JavaScript or a meta refresh redirect, are not friendly to search engines and can result in improper crawling of website content. In most cases, your redirected content (at its new location) can never be found by search engine spiders because they will not follow any type of redirect unless it is given a clean 301 redirection status.
Other reasons why you should do a permanent 301 redirect are to maintain search engine rankings, such as in Google. If you have an old, ranking URL in Google and move to a new, permanent location, a 301 redirect can pass the search engine ranking score of the old ranking URL (not abruptly; it will take time) to the new URL. Hence the new URL will appear and start to rank in the search engine results, replacing the old URL.
If 301 redirection is not implemented, the old URL will still rank in Google. And no matter what you do, your new URL will never appear in search results unless you do a 301 redirect.
In addition, one of the most serious mistakes that any WordPress blogger can make is failing to act on 404 errors. Blogs do change from time to time; old post URLs get deleted; and there is a need to move content to its new, permanent location. This is why, if you do a massive deletion of WordPress post URLs, you might notice a significant drop in search engine traffic if you fail to 301 redirect the deleted URLs to their new, permanent location (assuming a new location exists).
This article aims to provide the webmaster with the complete theory and application of doing 301 redirection in WordPress without heavy reliance on plug-ins. With proper information at hand, he or she can do 301 redirects easily in .htaccess, or even do conditional 301 redirection using PHP. This will provide the webmaster with flexibility in handling 301 redirection problems that goes beyond any plug-in solutions.
Next: The .htaccess solution >>
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