A common question that I run across is "What is a 301 redirect?" Simply put, it's a way to say that your page(s) have been permanently redirected to another location that you specify. There is a big difference between 301 redirects and 302 redirects. A 302 redirect signifies that your page(s) have temporarily moved. It is my opinion that 302 (temporary) redirects are absolutely pointless and should be avoided. In fact, during the 2007 Las Vegas Pubcon, the entire panel (consisting of Matt Cutts of Google, Tim Mayer of Yahoo, Greg Boser of WebGeurrilla, Danny Sullivan and others) said that there is no good use for 302 redirects ever.

Now that we have established that 301 redirects are the way to go, what are some circumstances that would make you want to use them in the first place?  Well, if for instance, you transferred a site from one domain to another, you will want all of your backlinks not turning into 404 File Not Found errors, but instead going to the new domain. Even if you are transferring files around on the same domain, you may want to utilize 301 redirects in order to prevent losing any backlinks you have gotten over time.

In order to perform 301 redirects with Apache, you need to be able to create/modify .htaccess files. As a general rule, I always place my .htaccess files in the document root.

A simple example, you own OldDomain.com, but need to transfer all traffic to NewDomain.com. The process is very simple. Go to the document root on the OldDomain.com server and if a .htaccess file already exists, add the following to it (or create it if it doesn't already exist):

Redirect 301 / http://www.NewDomain.com/

If you need to redirect only a specific directory:
Redirect 301 /directory /new_directory

Or if you need to redirect only a specific file:
Redirect 301 /file.html /new_file.html

As you can tell, the basic syntax is as follows:
Redirect 301 <old> <new>

That's all for this post, folks. Good luck : ).

Share This

We have been running quite a few adwords campaigns for clients for years now, and new changes, while showing some decent improvements, are showing some large issues. Quite a few people are talking about the quality score issues many are having with their landing pages of course, but few, if any, have touched upon the fact that the quality bot that visits your landing pages is heavily based on keywords and not on the landing page URL's.

What this means is that if you have 3,000 keywords, and only use a single landing page URL, their quality bot actually visits and downloads that page upwards of 3,000 times in a single day. This, in my opinion, is reckless design on the part of Googles coders and engineers. This method can cost webmasters quite a bit of extra bandwidth as well as taking server resources which could be used better towards making the website a fraction faster for live human visitors.

The reason google does it is plain and very understandable, to be able to apply a qualiy score to landing pages. The setbacks that googles quality bot faces are that many webmasters may use the same URL for a landing page, but change parts of the page based upon the query sent, or from the referer header sent, to tailor the page to the exact query the searcher made to find that adwords advertisement. While I understand the reasoning behind all this, I still see several common sense approaches to doing it without having to download the above examples landing page 3,000 times.

The landing page URL is entered by the advertiser upon creating an ad group, so google already knows if it has visited that landing page before. Now, to take into considerations that the landing page may change based on referer or query string, googles quality bot has but to visit that page from several keywords and from several different class C's to notice a pattern.

Share This

When you developed a branding strategy for your business, you covered every area that could possibly be branded.  You have your logo, your colors, your style all over your letterhead, business cards, advertisements…everything!  Potential clients recognize you in seconds, they think of you when they need your services.  Your award winning strategy is working wonderfully.  But, did your strategy include the internet?  Have you only recently decided to test the waters and have a website built?   Branding applies to every aspect of your business and that includes your website. 

Make sure you have your rules and guidelines written out for your designer.  They will need to know what your company requires in order for your website to stick to the path you've spent so much time creating.  By giving a clear outline of your business and it's philosophy and goals, you will help your designer create a site that matches your business, not just by having the right colors or by including your logo, but by incorporating your style into every part of the site.  If it's done right, it's a seamless trip from your website to your email to your letterhead to your invoice.  And every bit of it helps the client remember you when it counts.

Share This