301 redirects defend your website during an upgrade or redesign procedure. They all are easy to perform, many websites owners and developers don’t focus on them, this derails the SEO efforts and completely downs ranking in search engine. Therefore, creating and managing 301 redirects have been a major part of web development services USA and web designing services USA.

What Is A 301 Redirect?

If you want to change a page URL that is shown on search engine results, Google suggests using a 301 redirect. This is the right way to ensure that search engines and users are directed to the accurate page.

A 301 is a status code that commands a search engine that a page or post has shifted to a new location. It asks the search engine to transfer previous SEO history to a new piece of content and drives website traffic to the new location.

When To Use A 301 Redirect?

• You have transferred your site to a new domain, and now you want to ensure both traffic and SEO history is routed to the new location.
• You have changed a URL and you want your traffic to the old URL routed to the new URL.
• You are connecting two websites and ensure that links to old URLs are redirected to the latest pages.
• You have changed a URL (page, product, category, post, etc.) and you need your current PageRank to transfer to the new URL.

PageRanks ­­– It is a number from 0-10 that is assigned by Google. This number is a sign of how well the SEO for a specific piece of content. It is a part of the Google algorithm and changed a few times a year.

Setting Up 301 Redirects 

There are plenty of ways to set up 301 redirects. We use and recommend three imperative methods that are mentioned below:

.htaccess File

To implement a 301 redirect for sites that are running on Apache and hosted on servers, you need to access the server’s .htaccess file.

WP Engine Dashboard

If you are using WP Engine hosting, you can use this to set up 301 redirects right within your WP Engine dashboard.

Redirection Plugin For WordPress

If you are on WordPress, you can use a plugin like Redirection to set up 301 redirects. This plugin is intuitive and easy for any website owner to use.

Conclusion

301 redirects are crucial to SEO and the usability of your website. They not only transfer PageRanks and SEO history but also ensure users are not landing on 404 pages. You don’t need to be worried by 301 redirects. All you take the time to create and load them anytime you delete content, transfer content, or streamline your website architecture.