Ok, so search engines have indexed your site, your internal product pages may rank highly and you suddenly require to make changes to internal pages - maybe you need to change the URL - but you don't want to lose those valuable rankings. You need to implement a 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect is a code which will tell search engines that a page has permanently moved, therefore, search engines simply retain rankings for that particular page (including PageRank) and note that the page has simply changed filenames or URL path.

To implement a 301 redirect file is relatively simple. You will need your FTP logins. Firstly, find out whether you already have a .htaccess file, you would find this in your root folder for the website (FTP) - if you haven't got one - we can create one.

Open up notepad and immediately save the file as '.htaccess' as this is the file path that search engines understand to read.

You will then need to amend the .htaccess file with the right data. So in this format:

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

Save the .htaccess file and then upload to your root folder via FTP. If you already have a .htaccess file, simply add the code into your existing file by scrolling to the bottom, leave a line and insert the code.

Simple as that! You may want to create a custom page to advise that the page has moved so that visitors to the old page understand that the page has moved. This is done by simply creating and adding a new page to the site under the old filename/URL string.

Hey Presto! You have just implemented a 301 redirect.

Posted: 11/10/10 11:25