Redirecting Pages

So you have this old page that’s going to be replaced with a new page. Google knows about the old page but has no idea the new page exists until you publish it. The common and remedy for this is a 301 permanent redirect. But is this a good, safe and sound way to communicate with Google? This is a frequent problem when you are redesigning a web site. Usually a website redesign will employ new page names but contain the same or similar content that is on your old pages. In a perfect world I would like to create the website redesign with the same page names. Since that can’t always happen, redirecting your old pages to the new ones is commonly accepted in the webmaster community.

301 Redirecting Video

What if I have hundreds or perhaps thousands of redirects occurring on my website? Indeed I think we get a little tricky here. If I am thinking like Google I might think you are messing around with too many pages. Because of that, I might not rank your site as high as the competition that has little to no redirects on their website.

Using 301 redirecting is a great way to keep the traffic you have coming to pages search engines have indexed. It is generally considered polite and respected by search engines. You will have to realize it also comes down to trust. A search engine will know by the history of your website if they can trust you are redirecting people to the correct pages. There are also many deceitful  webmasters that will use 301 redirecting to their advantage. These techniques often include redirecting people to self serving pages that have nothing to do with what a visitor is interested in. In these cases search engines will not react favorably.

I think you can safely use 301 permanent redirecting in moderation. If there are too many 301 permanent redirects present on your site it may raise a suspicious eyebrow over at Google.  Ultimately this will affect your ranking.

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