301 Redirect – The SEO way to rename or move files or folders

In this article I will discuss page redirection techniques, what works and what to avoid.

What is page redirection and why would you want to use it?

Let’s say you rename a page on your website, for whatever reason. Perhaps you decided to revamp your entire naming convention, perhaps you decided to restructure your site and need to move pages into different folders, or you just realized that you are missing valuable keywords.

Let’s elaborate a bit on the keywords issue, since it is part of your search engine ranking success.

Let’s say the page in question is about customized USB drives and you named it page1.htm. Then you read some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) articles and you found out that some search engines use words in the actual file name as search keywords. Next time you do a Google search, take a look at the results, most will have words in the actual file name (in the URL section) bolded, denoting a keyword match. Your USB drives page will definitely benefit if named something like custom_usb_drives.htm instead.

Now that you renamed your page, you just created a symphony of issues for yourself, for your users and for your position in search engine results.

Linking issues:

You will have to point every link on your site to the new page name. If your site is small, it should not be a big deal, but if your site is large, you will inevitably make mistakes, mainly forgetting a link or two. This will result in visitors getting the dreaded “404 page not found” error when clicking on your links, robots (also know as crawlers or spiders) avoiding you, etc. Also, if you are heavily relying on visitors from search engines, then again, people will get a “404 page not found error”.

Let’s use the previous example, for a long time your page1.htm was indexed by major search engines. If someone types “custom usb drives” in a search engine box, your page shows up on the first search results screen. That is fantastic, only if someone clicks on the link, they will be pointed to page1.htm, not to custom_usb_drives.htm, because the first page is the one in the search engine’s index. It will take time, sometimes months, before the search engines update their indexes with your new page name.

Lost Page Rank (PR) issues:

Google developed a proprietary algorithm that assigns a Page Rank (PR) to every page on the web. PR is a number from 1 to 10 (10 being the ideal) and is intended to be a representation of how useful and popular a given page is. PR is influenced by many factors, one of the crucial ones being Link Popularity. Link Popularity is a representation of how many “quality” or “relevant” sites link to your page. Without getting into too much detail, it is increasingly difficult and time consuming to achieve a high PR for your pages, especially if you don’t have a really unique website with exceptional and highly sought after content. If you are merely operating a commercial site, in a competitive market (such as selling custom branded USB drives, as in our example), then it takes a lot of time and hard work to build a good page PR.

When you rename a page and discard the old page, you also discard the PR of the page. Your renamed page will be seen as a totally new page, with 0 PR.

What is the solution?

I will start by enumerating some of the methods used by the non-initiated.

Not recommended solution 1: Duplicate content.

First thing that probably comes in you mind is: well, why can’t you just duplicate the page and let nature take its course. In other words, you will have two identical pages, one named page1.htm and one custom_usb_drives.htm. This gives you time to update all links and the search engines will eventually index the new page.

This solution is not viable because search engines will penalize you quite badly, ‘thinking’ that you are trying to scam them by using the ‘duplicate content’ technique.

Not recommended solution 2: Custom error message.

You could create a custom error page. However, you will lose rankings on the next search engine update as the file will appear to be non-existent. As discussed above, it could be some time before the page with the new name will be indexed and will appear in people’s searches. Also, your web site visitors will be frustrated by the fact that they now have to dig through your site to find the desired information.

Not recommended solution 3: An HTML Meta redirect.

You could implement a so called Meta refresh in a blank or customized page that has the name of the old page (in our example, page1.htm) that points to the new page. The redirect can be instant, or delayed by a predetermine amount of time. The delayed redirect has the advantage that you can place an extra message, such as “please be aware that the page you are looking for changed location….. etc., etc…. you will be redirected automatically to the new location”

In the past, this was probably the most used technique.

Without getting into the mechanics of the Meta redirect, which is basically a META tag statement you ad to your HEADER section, know that there are also Java Script techniques that achieve similar results.

What is bad about this is that this is a technique often used by spammers to trick search engines and it should be avoided, unless the page is in a section of your site that isn’t indexed (also known as spidered or crawled). Search engine spammers create a page that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases – it usually has no real content. The page is then picked up by some search engines, but when a visitor clicks on the search engine entry, they are redirected to another site, often unrelated. Most search engines have filters to detect this. Using this form of search engine deception will see a site eventually banned or penalized by major players such as Google.

The recommended redirect strategy – 301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is the most efficient, visitor friendly, robot (spider, crawler) friendly and search engine friendly solution around for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache. If you are not sure, check with your hosting provider.

A 301 redirect is just a set of commands you type into your .htaccess file.

When a visitor (whether human or robotic) requests a web page via any means, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”. After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name.

First of all, you’ll need to find the .htaccess file in the root directory of where all your web pages are stored. If there is no .htaccess file there, you can create one with Notepad or a similar application. Make sure when you name the file that you remember to put the “.” at the beginning of the file name. This file has no tail extension.

Some hosting providers offer redirect services through their “control panels”, so you don’t have to perform low level changes on the .htaccess file itself. Instead, they provide a user friendly interface for this. Check with your hosting provider to see what the optimal way to perform a 301 redirect is in your case. I will continue the article with the barebones solution.

If there is a .htaccess file already in existence with lines of code present, be very careful not to change any existing line unless you are familiar with the functions of the file.

Scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then create a new line that follows this example:

redirect 301 /folder/page1.htm http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm

It’s as easy as that. Save the file, upload it back into your web and test it out by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be instantly and seamlessly transported to the new location.

Notes: Be sure not to add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – just put the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:

redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)

/folder/page1.htm (the original folder path and file name)

http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm (new path and file name)

The same format applies not only to renamed files, but also to files moved to a different location.

The 301 redirect is the safest way to preserve your rankings. On the next indexing (crawling, spidering), the search engine robot will obey the rule indicated in your .htaccess file and index the new page name every time a link or its internal database tries to access the old page. In the next update (again, this could take months), the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, along with some possible fluctuations in rankings as things settle. Don’t panic, this is normal.

What if your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server instead?

If you have access to the server, do this: In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect. Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”. Enter the redirection page, check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”. Click “Apply”.

If you do not have access to the server, ask your host to point you into the right direction.

In conclusion, the best and the most transparent way (to both human and robotic users) to rename and move files on your web site, while preserving your search engine ranks is the 301 redirect.

A Guide To Organic SEO And Its Benefits

What Is Organic SEO?

Put in the simplest manner possible, organic SEO is search engine optimization done manually using no black hat methods, no underhand methods and no automated scripting. It is the purest form of optimizing your website for the benefit of search engines, while still retaining interest for your site visitors, and done well it is exactly the thing that search engines are looking for in a website. Once they find it they will reward your site with better rankings and improved positions within the search engine results pages. Throughout the course of this article it will be referred to as simply SEO.

Understanding The Search Engines

Understanding Search Engines and their general concept is vital to the use of effective SEO methods. Search engines enable their visitors to enter a specific word or term, known as keywords. Once submitted, all pages containing those keywords that can be found in the search engine’s directory are listed on the search engine result pages. Each page is “ranked” according to relevancy, popularity and a few other factors. Therefore, in theory, the more relevant a page is to a given keyword the more likely it will appear at the top of the listings.

Introducing The Search Engine Spiders

Another important factor to remember about search engines is that they don’t use real people to crawl the billions of websites and judge how relevant they are. Instead they use automated software called a “spider” or a “bot” that does this work much quicker. The calculations that the search engine uses to determine the ranking of a website are called algorithms and in the case of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN these algorithms are changed on a regular basis. The changes and the specifics of the algorithms are not released to the public in order to prevent black hat SEOs from manipulating their sites to reach the top of the pile despite containing to information relevant to the search query or keyword.

Optimizing For Search Engines – Optimizing For Visitors

Of course to some extent, all of us reading this article are probably guilty of altering our web pages to meet the whims of search engines but it must be done in a positive and organic way. We understand that optimizing a page purely for the benefit of search engines spiders may massively detract from the actual value of the site to your visitors. Search engines understand this too, hence the evolution of the algorithms. With each new algorithm created and usually patented by search engines like Google, we are getting closer to a structure whereby sites are genuinely judged on their value to visitors. It may sound like an Isaac Asimov novel but the algorithms and the spiders are basically becoming more human like.

Basic Components Of SEO

The actual methods of optimizing your website are saved for another article, but the basic components of an SEO campaign are broken down into on page and off page optimization techniques. On page SEO includes factors like keyword inclusion, content optimization, page structure etc… whereas the main contributing factor of off page optimization is inbound links. There are many different factors to each of these areas and different SEOs will give you varying information on which factors are the most relevant to gain higher rankings. These extensive differences in opinion occur because nobody is certain of the algorithm criteria.

The Benefits Of SEO

SEO is probably the most beneficial way to conduct Internet promotion. It is highly cost effective, can yield long term results and the leads it generates are opt in and targeted. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider trying out alternative methods of advertising your site. For many, banner advertisements, press releases (can actually be used as part of an SEO campaign as well), PPC campaigns and sponsored listings prove to highly beneficial and including these will help your site’s popularity.

To Cost Effectiveness And To Life

The cost effectiveness is easily determined when you look at the potential of an SEO campaign compared to the method that many consider to be the next best thing – PPC. A PPC campaign will usually cost you anywhere upward of 5 cents per visitor generated. This means that for every thousand visitors you receive you will have paid $50. Some fairly basic SEO work on a web site containing ten pages will generate this kind of traffic on a monthly basis relatively quickly.

$50 doesn’t sound much but consider that you pay this in one month to receive the desired one thousand visitors. Over the space of a year you will have paid $600, and so on. Now consider that you are competing for a relatively competitive keyword and you find that you need to be paying a minimum of 50 cents per click to generate just the one thousand clicks in a month. All of a sudden you’re paying $6000 per year and you are still only getting one thousand clicks every month. $6000 will buy you an awful lot of SEO work and you should find that within a few months you are generating a lot more traffic using SEO.

Targeted Leads

Targeted leads are the best type of leads you can generate. It means that the visitors to your site are already predisposed to the basic topic of your site and are interested in what you have to say. It means that they will be more likely to purchase goods or services from your site, click on affiliate links or click Google ads to earn you revenue. Because SEO leads are physically searching for the topic that your site relates to you are guaranteed that they are interested in whatever you’re offering. First of all they search using keywords relevant to your site. They then read the description and name of your site and this further compounds their interest in the page in question and click on the link. Already they have become highly susceptible to the message of your web page.

So Remember…

SEO is a webmaster’s greatest tool but treated badly it can quickly blow up in your face. By ensuring you stick to the very letter of the law and do not use any underhand methods you should soon benefit from powerful leads that will frequent your site and earn you revenue.