How do Redirects Affect SEO? Must Know Tips Inside…

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Janet Lee
By Janet Lee

August 13, 2015

Redirects are essential while moving a website URL to a new location, and you may have wondered about the significance redirects have on SEO. 301 redirects send the update that a web resource has been moved permanently. Google states that once it encounters a 301 redirect and finds the content at a new URL that is similar to that of the old URL, it will allocate old URL signals to the new one. This is a positive news for SEO executives, as they can change their URLs without having to start everything again.

If you own a small site, then your redirect plan is quite simple. All you need to do is redirect all old URLs to the appropriate ones on the new site. By appropriate, we mean that the content of both URLs have a lot of similarities. In case you happen to use a newer modem, then you can install redirects via its interface. But, implementing a plan for sites with innumerable URLs has its own share of problems. It might not be a wise decision to attach thousands of rows to your ht access file. It will make the file too big and cause a number of problems. Redirects are often something frustrating for small websites. Though it is a monotonous work, it will help you in the long run. Once you launch your new site, your organic traffic will increase steadily.

A good idea to deal with a large number of redirects to ht access, is to leave URLs where they are and add meta fresh redirects that point to the new page. It helps  to protect the search equity of your URLs and reduce the load. It’s a big challenge to create mappings from old URLs to new URLs. One thing you can do to resolve the scaling issue for your company’s site is to utilize mapping rules, redirecting URLs with similar content to the new site, and prioritizing redirects based on different factors.

Adding and removing content is quite common amongst large sites and you are most likely changing URLs consistently. In this case you can create a rule that processes all of them dynamically. There may be times when old URLs might not match the content of a new site. As a result, these redirects lose their value. Google advises site owners to let URLs that are removed generate 404s(which states that resource wasn’t found) or 410(which states that the resource is gone).

Redirects based on existing rankings can also be of great help. An old URL ranking for a high ranking keyword should be redirected to the most suitable URL in the new site, even if it has no ranking signals in your reports. To protect high-profile rankings, you will also need to use an organic visibility report. By using them, you can keep a track of thousands of keywords and also show all the rankings they have for a particular domain. This will help you to find URL rankings even if you lack a big list of strategic keywords.