Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [160]
The second reason the 301 redirect is much more viable, however, is it maintains the value of incoming links from your old URL to the new URL. This is the most critical and valuable use of the 301 redirect for pages, because the search engines will be able to apply the benefit of the incoming links to a new page, rather than an incoming link going to no destination on your website.
Search engines recognize the permanent redirect as being a replacement address for a page. As such, the value of the old page will then pass to the new page, thus keeping the value of incoming links and not losing them. The permanent redirect is the only method that will retain this value. Using a 302 redirect will not pass the value of the old URL to the new URL. Using a 301 or a 302 redirect will require access to the web server, because best practice requires the status code to be generated by the web server. For Windows servers, the management panel allows easy management of redirection. Apache web servers use the .htaccess file to manage the redirects from the server.
Figure 14-7 shows an example using WebBug (a program used to view the server request and response). You can see that the domain www.coke.com redirects to the primary domain, www.coca-cola.com, using a 301 Moved Permanently redirect. The header of the returned document provides information about the server and the location of a redirected document, which is critical for search engines to index and apply.
Figure 14-7: www.coke.com employs a 301 Moved Permanently redirect to the domain www.coca-cola.com.
A 302 redirect will show up in the header response as well, as in Figure 14-8’s example of the request to www.ibm.com. IBM uses a 302 redirect to send all page requests to another directory, www.ibm.com/us/en.
Figure 14-8: IBM.com uses a 302 redirect to forward requests from the root domain to a different location.
Using HTTP Header Response Tools
For those who need to do some troubleshooting and identify the server response for redirects, WebBug (www.cyberspyder.com/webbug.html) is an excellent tool. There are other tools similar to this, usually called HTTP header viewer or HTTP header response tools.
The header contains the information that is returned to the requester of a document from a server. The server returns information such as the status of the request, such as 404 not found, 301 redirect, 200 OK, and many more; however, those are the most common.
I find these tools valuable when I suspect that there are redirects happening at the domain level that may prevent the search engines from accessing the website. Although this knowledge isn’t critical, it is handy to have some knowledge of how to troubleshoot certain problems. Finding a domain-level 302 redirect could be the key to a successful SEO campaign. Not finding it could cause an entire campaign to flop, simply because of a minor detail in the server settings. It is a minor detail, but it is a big deal— one that needs to be identified and managed. Knowing these details makes you a more valuable resource to your company and a more effective online marketer.
For large organizations where multiple people are responsible for the website and server maintenance, I recommend checking the redirects periodically to ensure that nothing has been changed. This is where routinely logging into a webmaster tool account or checking redirects at least quarterly can be good preventative maintenance.
Metarefresh
The metarefresh redirect was popular in the early days of web browsing, because it was commonly used to surprise a visitor