What Is a 301 Redirect and Why Is It Important for SEO?

SEO - 04 September 2022

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Websites may need to be moved to other pages for different reasons. However, there may also be cases where a domain name is completely moved to another domain name. In this and similar cases, visitors entering the old page are redirected to the new page or site with a 301 redirect.

What Is 301 Redirect?

As we have simply stated above, a 301 redirect is to ensure that visitors and search bots coming to the old URL encounter the new page if any page of a website or the entire website is permanently moved to another address. If there is a situation such as a temporary redirection of a page, then a 302 redirect should be made.

A 301 redirect is essential for site visitors and search engine bots. If a 301 redirect is not applied for a closed page, visitors to that page and search bots will encounter a 404 incorrect page. This will lead to a negative user experience and crawl budget problem.

How To Do a 301 Redirect?

There are many different ways to do a 301 redirect. You can see the most used methods under the headings below.

htaccess 301 Redirect

The first method we will talk about is how to redirect using the .htaccess file in the file manager of the site. When you enter the file manager of the site, you will see that this file is usually located under the public_html folder. If you can't find the .htaccess file in your site's file manager, it's probably due to 3 reasons:

1. The .htaccess file may be hidden. This file is usually marked as hidden in its default settings. To solve this problem, first click on the "Settings" section of the file manager. In the menu that follows, the "Show Hidden Files (dotfiles)" option is activated. Then the .htaccess file will appear under the public_html folder. 
2. The .htaccess file may not exist. If the .htaccess file is not visible despite the above edit to show hidden files, it probably does not exist. However, there is nothing to worry about. Creating the .htaccess file is pretty easy. It will be enough to create an empty Notepad for devices with Windows operating system and an empty TextEdit file for macOS and save this file with the .htaccess extension.
3. The website may not be running on the Apache server. Although it is a technical issue with web servers, the reason why the .htaccess file is not in the file manager may be that the server is not an Apache server. Because only Apache servers use .htaccess files. If the site is hosted on a server other than Apache server, redirection is made with different codes. Other than Apache, the most used web servers are Nginx and Windows/IIS. From this content for Nginx; For Windows/IIS redirection, more detailed information can be obtained from the contents in this link.

Before moving on to the redirect codes, let us remind you that the codes in the .htaccess file are read line by line. Therefore, when adding code to the .htaccess file, it is useful to leave a blank line under the added code. This blank line indicates that the code is finished.

Different codes are used for different purposes in redirecting using the .htaccess file. Let's take a closer look at these situations and the codes to be used in these situations.

Redirecting an Old Web Page to a New Page

Here is the code that needs to be added to the .htaccess file to redirect an old web page to a new web page:

Redirect 301 /old-page.html /new-page.html

Redirecting a Non-www to a www Address

The code that should be used to redirect an address that does not contain www to the address bar is as follows:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.

Redirecting a www to a Non-www Address

The code to be used to redirect an address entered with www to a non-www domain name is as follows:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.ornek.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.

How to Make a WordPress 301 Redirect?

As it is known, WordPress is the most used content management system in the world, also known as CMS. The most important reason for this is that WordPress has plugins that allow many different operations to be done easily.

301 redirection of a site with WordPress infrastructure can also be done easily with a free plugin.

The plugin is called Redirection. After activating this plugin, which you can easily install on the site from the Plugins menu, the relevant menus of the plugin will allow you to quickly redirect.

After the plugin is installed, it is located under the tools menu. The plugin can be opened by clicking the Redirection button here.

After opening the plugin, the plugin must be installed first. Then, when the "Add New" button is pressed for redirection, a menu like this is displayed.

Here, the old URL address should be entered in the source URL section, and the new URL address to which the redirect will be made in the Target URL section. Then pressing the “Add Redirect” button will be sufficient for the redirection process to take place.

How to Do a 301 Redirect with Cloudflare

Many websites are concerned about security and related reasons. There are some third-party services that are used to address these concerns and control traffic to the site. The most known and the most preferred one in terms of user experience is undoubtedly Cloudflare.

301 redirects for sites that perform security audits through Cloudflare servers are made from the Cloudflare user panel. The following steps should be followed for a Cloudflare 301 redirect:

1) Öncelikle Cloudflare panelinde sol tarafta yer alan “Rules” menüsü altındaki “Page Rules” kısmına tıklanmalıdır. 

What is the Importance of 301 Redirects for SEO?

The 301 redirect is, of course, a concept highly related to SEO, as it is directly related to the link structure of the website. Because the correct setting of 301 redirects is a situation that will directly affect the ranking of the website.

301 redirect is also a value that reveals the value of a page in Google's eyes, although it is not directly evaluated after this date, which Google used actively until 2014.

Although Google does not currently use the value it creates depending on the PageRank algorithm as a direct ranking factor, it has been stated in the messages given by Google officials at various times that PageRank is still taken into consideration along with many other factors in the rankings.

John Mueller, who has worked at Google for many years and is currently working as a consultant at Google, states that PageRank is still being evaluated in a dialogue with a Twitter user in 2020.

301 redirects are also directly related to this PageRank value. Until 2016, the PageRank of a page with 301 redirects was losing about 15% with a single redirect. When 301 redirects were made more than once, this depreciation was more than 15%.

However, in a tweet by Gary Illyes, one of the Google developers in 2016, it was stated that 301 and 302 redirects no longer affect the Google PageRank algorithm.

Therefore, redirecting a page to another page with a 301 redirect makes the redirected page equivalent to the referring page. In other words, 30X redirects, in essence, do not differ between pages for Google bots.

However, there are some other points to consider in terms of SEO when doing a 301 redirect.

The HTTP version page should be redirected to the HTTPS version page.

Most of the time, especially on websites made with CMS, this is an automatically developed feature. However, as we mentioned above in detail, a website's secure connection is possible with an HTTPS link and SSL certificate. Therefore, if the website has visibility with the HTTP version, it should be ensured that this URL is redirected to the HTTPS version.

301 redirected pages should be removed from the sitemap file.

The sitemap file is a .xml file that contains all the links of a website and guides Google bots to crawl the site more easily. In some cases, this file contains 301 redirected links.

Since pages with 301 redirects are technically invalid, there is no point in having them in the sitemap file. For this reason, removing 301 redirected pages from the sitemap is of great importance in reducing the crawl budget.

Redirect chains should be avoided.

Redirect chains refer to multiple redirects of a URL. Google warns site developers about this: “In cases where Googlebot and site crawler follow more than one redirect (page 1 > page 2 > page 3), our recommendation is to redirect directly to the last page. In cases where this is not possible, the ideal referral chain should not exceed 3 referrals and should be less than 5 in any case.”

Redirect loops should be fixed.

The redirect loop occurs when a URL in the redirect chain redirects to another URL in the chain.

For example; page 1 > page 2 > page 3 > page 2 > page 3 > page 2 > page 3 …