Question:

I’ve come across the term ‘301 redirects’ a few times now, in different contexts, sometimes to do with online marketing.  I’m a bit confused about what they’re for.  Can you guys clear things up for me?

Answer:

Hi Vicky, thanks for coming to us.  We recommend and carry out 301 redirects for many of our clients and I am happy to help clarify this for you.

It’s not surprising that you’ve heard about 301 redirects in multiple contexts, because they have a range of uses in online marketing solutions, website development and more.  To make things simple, we’ll explain four circumstances when you will want to use 301 redirects.

1.  Changing URLs on your website

There are several reasons you might change the URLs on your website.  One is to make your URLs key phrase rich. For example, www.domain.co.uk/2719371/nor/w10 to www. domain.co.uk/norway-walking-holidays.

Another is to change them from dynamic URLs to static URLs.  For example, www. domain.co.uk/cat?=467 to www. domain.co.uk/norway-walking-holidays.

Whatever the reason, the individual web pages can be the same, just the URL for that page changes. For instance, the above-mentioned page has always been about Norway Walking Holidays. 

If you have made such a change, you will want human users who click on the page’s existing URL  (maybe they have bookmarked it or maybe the old URL is part of a link from an external website)  to be redirected to the new URL of that same page.  In almost all cases, you will also want any SEO assets of the old URL to be transferred over to the new URL, in order not to undermine your work and affect the outcome of whatever online marketing solutions you have chosen.

The 301 redirect will direct the human users and search engines to the new URL.

2. Website Restructure

At some point you might want to overhaul your website, resulting in a very different structure.  In this case, the page for Hotel A might have originally been on the URL www.domain.co.uk/norway/hotels/hotel-a in the old structure while, in the new site, it might be, for example, www.domain.co.uk/hotel-a. 

As in the previous scenario, this page is still the same page but with a new URL.  As such you would want to redirect your users to the new URL, and transfer the SEO assets of the same page from the old URL to the new URL.  The 301 redirect once again fulfils these requirements.

3. Discontinuing a product or service

At some point, you will might decide to stop offering a particular product or service.  One option is to edit the content of that page to say so, providing links to some other products/services that might be of interest to customers. 

A second option is to use a 301 redirect.  Customers who land on the Norway Walking Holidays page could be redirected to the general Walking Holidays page, where the full range of other options is immediately presented.  Alternatively, they could be redirected to the Sweden Walking Holidays page, as it might be the most similar product.  While this isn’t exactly what they were looking for, some might think, “Oh, I hadn’t considered that.  Let’s see what this one’s like.”  Additionally, the SEO assets of the old Norway page will be transferred to (and added to) the Sweden page.

4. Website design

It is also possible that, for website design reasons, you will want to move users around your website with a 301 redirect.  The specifics of this may vary quite differently each time.  I’ll give you one example straight from our office. 

This week, we tasked our web designer with creating a new Wordpress-based website.  We wanted the website home page to have very particular features and functionality.  “Oh,” our web designer said, “Wordpress won’t let me do that on its home pages.”

We quickly had a solution.  Build a page outside of Wordpress to get the exact functionality we were looking for and call that our home page. From there, link to the Wordpress category pages.  This presented another problem: when users click ‘Home’ from those category pages, Wordpress automatically takes them to the Wordpress home page, which we didn’t want.

The solution to that?  We set up a 301 redirect from the Wordpress home page to our own home page.  Human users are then redirected to our home page, instead of the Wordpress home page.

In conclusion

Whenever a website owner wants to move both human users and search engines from one URL on their website to another, we recommend using 301 redirects.  They can efficiently forward human users and transfer SEO assets, making them a very useful tool.

I hope that this has cleared some things up for you Vicky, and helped you see how 301 redirects can assist in online marketing solutions and more.  Please do get in touch if you have any more questions!

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