301 Redirect for Search Engines

[megri]

301 Redirect for Search Engines

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page.

Redirect with htaccess
Create a .htaccess file (if does not exists) in your root directory.
Redirect permanent / http://www.newurl.com

Redirect in PHP
<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.newurl.com" );
?>

[megri]

Mod rewrite for 301 redirection

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^whatever/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1/ [R=301,L]
or
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]
The second example only changes one URL.

(.*) and $1 work the same way here as in mod_rewrite, so you can easily change a lot of URLs with one line. The only change with redirects and mod_rewrite is the R=301 (Redirect 301).

[megri]

For changing to www from non-www version of your URL you can use

Quote:

[space] RewriteEngine on (add that if it's not already there) RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} . RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.MyDomain\.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MyDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] [space]

[megri]

Here is good article on it
http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/...rlResults.html

[megri]

WebmasterWorld forum pageoneresults says about how 301 works for Google

1. Quote:

   Implement 301 (old URI to new URI). Within 72-96 hours new URI indexed. Within 2 weeks old URI goes URI only with a Similar Pages link. Within that same 2 week period (it varies), the new URI gets fully indexed with page title and meta description (yes, in this case the meta description is being displayed as the snippet). The new pages begin to perform for the same phrases they did previously. Within 30 days, old URIs are usually purged but they do appear on occasion as a URI only listing. The new URIs don't seem to be affected by this shuffling of the old URIs in and out of the index.

You can read more here

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/32516.htm