How To Use Redirect Pages
By Anna Johnson on August 10th, 2009When it comes to attracting web traffic, there’s nothing worse than attracting traffic to a webpage that no longer exists!
When web visitors get the dreaded ’404 File Not Found’ page, you instantly lose credibility and also risk losing your search engine rankings as the search engines de-list the non-existent webpage.
While it’s a good idea to include a helpful message on your 404 page that might help visitors find their way to their desired destination, even better is to address non-existent pages with a redirect strategy.
To this end, you have two main alternatives: implementing a permanent redirect or a temporary redirect.
To implement a permanent redirect you want to put a 301 redirect page in place. This allows for visitors to be almost instantly redirected from the original destination to the new, and is the ideal option from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.
Implementing a 301 redirect is a matter of utilizing a .htaccess file which, among other things, is also useful for blocking traffic from certain IP addresses.
To create an .htaccess file you use a text document (e.g. created in Notepad) and include the appropriate instruction. For more information on this visit Rebecca Appleton’s helpful article (see link below).
If you want a temporary redirect, a 302 redirect page is the answer. This allows you to move traffic to a specific page for a certain period of time. Once you remove the 302 redirect, your traffic continues to the old destination.
As you might imagine, a 302 redirect is probably not appropriate for redirecting traffic away from pages that no longer exist; rather it is is useful for moving traffic from one page to another – perhaps for seasonal/promotional reasons e.g a holiday period or special event.
Source: Rebecca Appleton, “Using Redirect Pages In Your SEO Strategy,” Search Marketing Standard
