Want to keep your hard-earned webpage rankings? Write “301 redirections”!

How long have you had your current website for? A year, two, maybe more? If you’ve planned to redesign it and don’t want to lose any of your hard-earned search engines rankings, this article is for you!

What’s a “301 redirection”?

A “301 redirection” means that you’re instructing the server where your website pages reside to redirect a URL that is not in use anymore permanently to a new corresponding one.

What can happen if you don’t use them?

Let’s take an example:

Your current website has a “Contact Us” page with the following URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/contactus.html

You’ve decided to redesign your website and now the new “Contact Us” page’s URL is: http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us/

Guess what would happen to these long-term results Google and other major search engines have indexed?

You got it. They won’t work anymore. Your visitors will get the dreaded “404 Page doesn’t exist”…

This can contribute to losing your page rankings really quickly as search engines can detect these “404 pages” and how many times your visitors land on one. After a certain amount of time, if these pages aren’t fixed, search engines will assume you’re not taking much care of your website and are not providing real value to your visitors and will demote your pages on search results.

But wait! There’s a way to fix this!

Of course, I assume you’ve chosen a professional web design company to redesign your website…

Before launching the new website, I would recommend to pull the sitemap of your current website to get an exhaustive list of your webpages. Then your web designer should be able to write all the corresponding “301 redirections” on the server where your new website is hosted to instruct all old URLs to permanently redirect to the new ones.

Et voila!

Even better…

How about all these links you’ve posted on forums, blogs, social media platforms as part of an online marketing strategy?

Well, provided all your old URLs have been “301-ized”, you can rest assured your efforts weren’t in vain!

There are plenty of other type of redirections and related tips and tricks to ensure your website serves you and your business well on the long term.

Want to learn more? Contact me today, I’d be delighted to help you!