As businesses evolve, particularly in the online sector, rebranding can be a common occurrence. Why? Well, maybe the business is sold and the new owners want to change things around, or maybe over time the original owner has found their brand needs a freshen up to keep up with the times, or with products, trends or technology.
Being able to keep important parts of your old brand during and after your rebrand, like your existing customer bases familiarity with your brand and how to find you, maintaining an existing database of clients and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), are critical to minimising the disruption to your business.
So it’s important, just like physically moving house, to make sure you follow a few steps when moving your business from one brand to another.
In this article, we are going to focus on one aspect of this, your website and the necessary steps you need to take to ensure your existing customers, your backlinks and your SEO “juice” all gets sent to your new site. In the world of the internet, this is called a 301 Redirect. We will also discuss the differences between a 301 Redirect and a 302 Redirect.
What Are HTTP Status Codes?
The Hyper Text Transfer Protocol or HTTP language is the language your web browser (client) uses to connect to websites (servers). When the client requests connection/information from a server, the server returns a code (HTTP Status Code) based on how it has received and processed the client request. A complete list of Status Codes can be found on the wikipedia site page for status codes.
The most common status code you may be familiar with is the 404 – page not found, where the server is unable to find the resource requested by the client.
The status codes are grouped into five main categories:
1xx - Informational Response Codes: these indicate that the server has acknowledged the request and that the client should wait while the server completes the request.
2xx - Success Codes: these indicate that the server has received, acknowledged and accepted the request from the client. When a client sends a request to a server and the result is success, a 200 – OK code is the normal response.
3xx - Redirection Codes: these indicate that the client must undertake further action for the server to be able to complete the request.
4xx - Client Error Codes: these indicate that the server has received what it believes to be a request that is in error from the client. Eg: 404 where the client has requested a page or resource that the server cannot successfully complete.
5xx - Server Error Codes: these indicate that the server has incurred an error processing the clients request. A common example of this is the generic “500 Internal Server Error” status code.
What is a 301 Redirect?
As the status code implies, this is a 3xx Redirection Status Code sent from the server to the client. The 301 Redirect tells the client that the information required is now permanently located at a different URL, and that the clients request will be redirected to the new URL.
It is extremely important to note, that while ever the old URL exists, a 301 redirect will pass all ranking power from the old URL to the new URL. Without a 301 Redirect, once you've moved any content away from your old URL, anyone who tries to visit it will receive the status code 404 - page not found message. The 301 Redirect maintains the user experience without them having to learn a new URL, as when they attempt to visit the old URL, the server will respond with a 301 Redirect, sending you to the new URL.
This process happens so fast that the user will unlikely see any impact, and the only indication that may make them aware of it is the fact that they will see a different URL to the one they typed into their browser.
Another key factor to consider with a 301 Redirect is the role it plays with search engines. A 301 Redirect correctly informs search engines where content has moved to, and allows them to keep their index up to date. This is important for SEO, as the search engines ranking of the indexed content will be maintained despite the move to the new URL.
How To Apply A 301 Redirect?
The process of implementing a 301 Redirect can generally be done two ways, either as an entire domain name redirect with your domain name host, or as an individual page redirect with your content management system. Either way is pretty straight forward, however the steps to take will vary depending on your domain hosting service or your content management provider. If you aren’t sure, your domain host provider or content management provider will most likely have step by step guides to help, or provide support services to help.
As the number of domain host providers is vast, its almost impossible to provide guides for them. Your best solution is to Login in to your domain host providers dashboard and search for “301 redirect”.
Should you wish to attempt these redirects at a content management system level, the following support links will help for Wordpress and Shopify.
How to Redirect a URL in WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, so it makes sense to include a link to their support page directly. This is the Wordpress site redirect documentation.
How to Redirect a URL in Shopify
Likewise, Shopify is a very popular content management system, and this is Shopify’s site redirect documentation.
PLEASE NOTE: It is extremely important to point out at this time, that if you are not sure or not confident in what you are doing, seeking professional assistance, either from your domain host provider, content management platform support, or from a web developer.
When To Use A 301 Redirect
Here are some specific cases where you will want to use the 301 redirect in your business:
1. Rebranding Your Existing Website.
So you have decided to change direction in your business, or your business model now has extra bits and pieces that need to be considered. A new logo maybe, or a new, more SEO optimised brand name. There are many reasons why people want to rebrand, so a 301 Redirect from your old domain name to a new one is a very simple way of getting your website URL to match your brand without having to lose all the connectivity of your old clients (bookmarks, desktop links, and just familiarity with typing the name into the browser). Just as important, if not more so, is the ability to keep all the SEO work you have done under your old brand. Search Engine indexing and backlinks are the two main ones to consider. Imagine losing every backlink you have worked so hard to get, plus the ones that have come to your organically. A complete rebrand 301 Redirect would be best done with your domain host provider, as it will redirect all your pages and content at the same time.
2. You Have Bought A Business And Want To Change The Name.
Very similar to point 1 above, just the reason to do it is different. You’ve just bought someone elses business and want to put your own stamp on it. No point cutting off all the work the previous owners have done. Using a 301 with your domain host provider will help keep the users coming, while being able to put your own twist on your new venture.
3. You want more than one domain name pointing to the same content.
Another example of when to use a 301 Redirect is if you want to have numerous domain names all pointing to the one location, such as having www.domainname.com.au and www.domainname.com URL’s both pointing to the same content. In this case you would choose one, most likely the .com.au domain to permanently be redirected to the .com domain.
4. You want to be able to use a domain name for a subset of your existing domain. For example: You sell garden tools, and your website is www.gardentools.com, however you would like to have a dedicated domain name for your specific collections. So you might have a domain name www.shovels.com point to your shovels collection at www.gardentools.com/shovels.
5. You want to remove a product from your e-commerce store, as you have a newer, better product to sell.
You can use the 301 Redirect on your content management system (Wordpress, Shopify etc) to redirect any user or backlink to your old product, to your new product. Why do this instead of just updating the old content with the new product content? Well, you might want to keep your purchase history intact for the old product, and start a new purchase history for the new product, particularly if you are providing a warranty period and/or spare parts for the old product, as it will remain in your e-commerce store even though people cant see it any more.
6. Consolidating Several Pieces Of Content.
Lets say you have written several pieces of content that cover a similar topic, and rather than consolidating into one document and losing all the SEO “juice” from the other documents, you can use a 301 redirect from the content no longer required to ensure that people looking for the old content can still find it in the new location. This is best done at the content management system, as it is not an all encompassing total website redirection. An example would be: Blog Posts on lets say dog grooming, dog washing and flea control. You may wish to amalgamate all three posts into one, and so you would copy the content from two into the one you want to keep, and use a 301 Redirect from their URL to the URL of the new updated blog post.
What is the Difference Between a 301 Redirect and a 302 Redirect?
301 Redirects are permanent, and 302 Redirects are temporary. A 301 Redirect is used when a URL has permanently changed location, while a 302 Redirect should be used if you intend to move the page back under the original URL some time in the future.
The intent is the same, however the key point to emphasis here is that, as a 302 Redirect is considered temporary (although it could be permanent if you forget to remove it), it DOES NOT pass on the search engines indexing from an SEO point of view. As such, 302 Redirects should be used with caution.
301 Redirect Common Mistakes
Now that you understand the 301 redirect and what it does, lets make sure you don't make a mistake that could adversely impact your site’s Search Engine Optimisation or your users experience.
1. Make sure you set up a 301 redirect from ALL of the different versions of your brand's domain to maximise your search engine results. For example: make sure you have a redirect from https://www.domainname.com to https://domainname.com, as these are two different domain names.
2. Setting up a 301 redirect after creating a new domain name to replace an old domain. In 2010, Toys 'R Us purchased the toys.com domain without setting up a 301 redirect first, and their new site's SEO results plummeted because it was re-crawled by Google as a brand-new domain without inbound links from the original Toys 'R Us domain pointing to it. Be sure to set up the 301 redirect before migrating your website content so your site doesn't lose traffic in the process.
3. Using a 302 redirect during content migration. Unless you're temporarily migrating your website's content while updating or repairing your website, use a 301 redirect to maintain the inbound links and your search rankings while making changes to your domain.
4. Redirect a page with a different intent than the destination page.
Make sure that you're redirecting to the correct pages. For example, using the garden tools example previously, you wouldn’t want to redirect people looking for shovels to a webpage showing fertiliser. It creates a bad experience for your users.
5. Although its possible to use 301 Redirects to fix broken links on your site, it is best practice to remove the broken link or have it point to the new URL on your site, as a website that relies on 301 Redirects internally is not good practice.
In Summary
Keeping on top of your redirects will keep the users experience optimised, and will contribute to your SEO being on point, which in turn will lead to more happy visitors to your website.
Whether you're about to overhaul all your website content in a site migration or domain name change, or you're just reconfiguring some outdated web pages, 301 redirects can help. Remember, 301 redirects ensure your SEO won't plummet and website visitors will continue to find the content they're looking for on your website.
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