How To Create A 301 Redirect To A New Page URL

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 30 of January , 2008 at 10:11 am

If you redesign a web page and change its URL, you’ll need to perform a 301 redirect so that you don’t lose any search engine rankings. To do that you need to access or .htaccess file or create one. If you use a CMS, this may pose a challenge for you. If possible, contact the company that manufactured your CMS and ask them if they can help you with a 301 redirect. If you can make an .htaccess file then you can make sure traffic to your old page URL is transferred to the new page URL with no issues.

To create a new .htaccess file, you’ll need to open Notepad and save it as a blank page with the name .htaccess. Make sure nothing follows the final s. There is no extension to the file name. It has to be .htaccess. Otherwise, browsers and search bots won’t be able to read it.

If there is already an existing .htaccess file on your server then download it to your desktop so you can work on it. Add the following code to the file:

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

Change old/old to the name of the page that are you moving. In other words, if your domain is www.mydomain.com and the specific page you are moving to a new URL is /thispage/thispage.html then /thispage/thispage.html is what you need to put right after redirect 301. The same thing goes for you and new. You is your domain name and new is the name of the new page.

Put that code at the very end of any other code in the .htaccess file. Be sure to skip a line before you add it. Then save the new .htaccess file to your desktop and upload it to your server. Be sure to run a test by typing in the old page URL into your browser and watch to see if you are taken to the new page.

Category: SEO

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg

No comments yet.