Renaming/moving a page? 301 redirect it!
|
|
|
| 1.0/5.0 (1 votes total) |
|
|
|
Michael Bloch
|
Michael Bloch |
Michael Bloch
Team ThinkHost
http://www.thinkhost.com
ThinkHost
is an international web hosting company offering reliable and well
supported FrontPage, PHP and MySQL hosting services, plus a wide
range of related resources for their clients.
|
Michael Bloch
has written 2 articles for WebKnowHow. |
View all articles by Michael Bloch... |
If
you are considering moving a page on your web site into another
folder or simply renaming it; there's a couple of important points
to consider. The most important issue is that if the page you are
moving or renaming has a good search engine ranking already, or
may have been bookmarked by your visitors; all your hard work could
be lost.
Bearing
in mind that search engines can take months to refresh their listings,
any visitor clicking on a search engine result may be severely frustrated
if they don't arrive on the page on your site. You could always
use a custom 404 error page; but this is still an extra hurdle for
visitors to jump and the rankings you have built up for the page
in question will be lost.
Wouldn't
it be great if you could set up your site so it was "smart"
enough to know that the page had been renamed or moved and then
take the visitor to the correct page? Well, you can!
Enter
the 301 redirect
One
of the simplest ways to redirect visitors is to put up a blank page
with what's known as a "meta-refresh" tag, but, this is
frowned upon by many search engines and definitely won't save your
rankings, so we won't discuss it any further. If you are currently
using meta-refresh tags, it would be wise to consider changing them
over to a 301 redirect as it is the most efficient and friendly
solution. Search engine spiders and human visitors will be presented
with the correct page if the old page is requested - seamlessly.
A 301
redirect is implemented in your .htaccess file.
What
is .htaccess ?
.htaccess
is a text file that is checked by the web server when a request
for a page/item is made by a browser, agent or spider. It contains
specific instructions on how to handle specific requests and also
plays a role in security.
What's
a 301 redirect?
"301"
translates to "moved permanently". After the code, the
name and location of the moved or renamed page is noted, then there
is a space, and then the new location and name of the file.
Implementing
a 301
First
of all, check with your web host that you can use a 301 redirect
- not all web servers will be compatible.
You'll
then need to download the .htaccess file from your web site which
can be found in the root of your documents directory via ftp (use
ASCII mode). If a .htacess file isn't present, create one with Notepad
or a similar text editor. Ensure you remember the "."
at the beginning of the file name and do not use a tail extension
If
there is a .htaccess file already in existence with lines of code
present, be very careful not to change any existing code. It's probably
wise to create a backup of this file in case you make a mistake.
Scroll
down to the end of the current code, miss a line and then create
a new line using the following example as a guide.
redirect
301 /current/currentname.htm http://www.you.com/newfolder/newname.htm
That's
all there is to it - save and upload back to the document root directory
and then test it out by typing the old address into your browser
- you should be seamlessly redirected to the new page name/location.
Note:
Do not use "http://www" in the first section of the statement
- just add 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 directive that the page has permanently moved)
/currentfolder/currentname.htm
(the old path and file name)
http://www.you.com/newfolder/newname.htm
(new path and file name)
Moving/renaming
many pages?
The
basic 301 redirect is a great solution for changes to a few pages,
but what about dozens of pages or an entire site? A more powerful
set of instructions for URL redirects is contained in the Apache
mod_rewrite module. Learn more about it here:
http://httpd.apache.org/
docs/misc/rewriteguide.html
This
article is copyright (C) 2003 and cannot be reproduced without express
written permission from ThinkHost. |