Today we're going to talk a little bit about 301 redirects and how they can help your SEO. 301
redirects, you might have heard of this before, maybe you haven't. They're an important part of
SEO and I'm going to give you a couple cases in which they are particularly useful. Before we
go into more detail about how you use 301s, let's talk about what they are. At the most basic level,
a 301 redirect is a way to redivert a web address from one to another. The 301 is basically
signifying that it is a permanent redirect. There are other types of redirects that are used such
as 302s which are meant to be temporary or 307s. But for the most part you're usually only going
to want to implement a 301 redirect. Now this can be done through a couple different means. Probably
the easiest is on whatever web platform you are using to build your site there is usually some
type of setting for URL redirects--that's what they're called in SquareSpace, and in WordPress,
you can use any number of plugins to do a 301 redirect. Some of the SEO plugins use 301
redirects. I use separate redirect plugins such as Redirection or Simple 301 Redirects in order
to achieve this. Basically in most cases what it will do is rewrite a file that's on your server
called the htaccess file. But all you really need to know is when you type in a web address the 301
redirects are use--if you type in one web address, it goes to another one. Most web platforms have
the ability to facilitate this. They might call it different things but that's basically what it is.
Use cases: there's two main use cases for 301 redirects and that is domain wide
and then page specific. Let's talk about the domain wide redirects first. Now this would happen
when you change your domain name. We did that with our site about four years ago now. We changed the
name from LockedownDesign.com to LockedownSEO dot com now the significance of that is why
we have a domain level redirect, which by the way, we implement that at the domain registrar,
and some will let you do that, but basically, any URL that had the old one [domain] it redirects to
the new one. Yyou're redirecting that at the domain registrar level. If you have a domain,
you would go in there and basically achieve that at the DNS level. It's usually under
something like domain forwarding. But the real reason why you want to have that is--let's say
for six or seven years, or 10 or 12 years, you've been collecting hyperlinks from other websites,
and they're pointing toward your website. Well all that is basically signals to Google that there is
some authority with your site. The more sites that you have linking to your website, especially if
they're ones that Google expects to see [linking], for example social media or third-party generation
lead generation sites, or from websites that are covering news within your industry,
or other websites that are somehow related to your industry, those links become very valuable in
Google determining whether they should push your site up the rankings or not. So you don't want
to lose those if you start with a new domain, if you change your domain name. Because essentially,
when you change your domain name, or if you buy a new domain name, that domain doesn't have anything
attached to it whatsoever. There's absolutely no record of it [having authority from links]. It's
basically starting from scratch with no authority tied to it. Even if it's a similar
domain [name] it's meaningless. Think of your domain name as a unique identifier of an entity,
and Google uses that to determine authority. Just think of it like that. Domain level redirects
essentially take all the link power from that old domain and then move it to the new one. Now when
you do this, you're going to want to implement a change of website address form in Google Search
Console, and we have a video on that. Let's talk about the second type of 301 redirect, and this
one is commonly used--this is when you change URL or the web address of a page. It's for the same
reason you would want to use the domain level, but except you're using the page level. Now this would
be for several different reasons. Let's say you've been working on your website for 10 or 12 years,
and it's gotten enormously huge, and there's lots of pages on there. You might have pages
on your site that have internal links that pass or signify importance of a page,
but they they pass a little bit of internal authority to pages on your site. If you have an
old web address in there, maybe you changed some of the URLs on your website before,
if you don't implement a 301, then when people go to that old page, and then they click on the link,
it's going to go to a 404 page not found screen. That's for one it's bad for user experience,
but it also kills the link power that's distributed internally on your site from being
passed around. But even more important than that, in my estimation when you have links from outside
websites maybe you got written up in the new york times maybe you got a link from your local news
network maybe you had some favorable reviews by an industry newspaper and they're linking to an
inner page on your on your website but if you changed the URL at any time you know that link
power disappears if you don't use a 301 redirect now there's another reason that you would want to
use 301 redirects and a very important thing with this is Googlebot, the
user agent, the browser crawler that Google uses to go and find all the different pages on the web,
that end up in the Google index, which is the search results. That mechanism has an infinite
memory, and it will remember any web addresses or URLs that it has encountered in the past. If
you had different versions of your website, and this happens a lot now, because a lot of the the
websites that have some history to them, maybe they launched in the 90s or the early 2000s,
or even the 2010s, they might have changed their website entirely. It might still have the same
domain name, but they might have changed the way that the web addresses are done, and for
example let's say that a long time ago Google indexed pages on your site like yourdomain.com
index.html or slash about .html. Now it [Googlebot] remembers those URLs, and it's going
to try and crawl them at some point. You might even have some ancient links from a website that
hasn't changed in 10 or 15 years. So you want to capture that link power, and you also don't want
to confuse Googlebot and you want any occurrences of those old URLs to divert to your current pages
now one thing that I do when you're dealing with an older site like that to eliminate any
possibility of old pages leaking out that linking power and there by giving up site authority
is to go in archive.org and look at an old version of your website, so that's the wayback machine,
the internet archive. Usually you can find an old version of the site and you can kind of
get an idea of what links or what the prominent pages on those websites would have been. Then you
basically go and create redirects for those old pages, those ancient pages, maybe they haven't
existed in years, Google might still try and crawl them. Essentially with 301s, they're not
that difficult to implement. WordPress has tons of plugins for them. SquareSpace has URL redirects.
Other platforms have their own version of this [redirects]. They might call it 301 redirects,
they might call it URL mapping, or URL redirects. But basically it's a mechanism for diverting
that authority into a current site and not losing any of it, not having a bad user
experience because you have link rot or broken links that no longer exist. As a final tip
as a bonus, if you've made it this far in the video, and by the way give this video a thumbs
up if you've enjoyed everything that you've heard so far, but another bonus thing that you can do
is if you have changed your domain in the past, or if there are other versions of the site, go back
and and find those versions of the domain, buy up those domains, if you've lost a domain that you
had in the past--and I've seen this happen a few time--where websites had a previous domain,
they changed the domain, they lost track of the old one, they no longer have it. It's as simple
as going and buying it [old domain]. If it's available, if no one else has grabbed it up,
and then redirecting that to the current website. Oftentimes, I've actually seen this with a few
clients, where if you do this, it gives a boost like almost right away in SEO, because it might
not have a ton of old links on that old domain, but there might be some, where it's basically
a broken link, and if you don't get it together eventually, those people [other webmasters] will
just say, that's a dead link, and eventually when they get around to cleaning up their website,
then they might change that out for a different link. So it's just all the way
good and around primarily what you would want to use 301 redirects for is your own website
or older versions of your website or redirecting old pages from your website to your new one. That
is what I would recommend to be the safest and the best practice for using 301 redirects.
If you learned something from this video today, please leave a comment down below, and let me know
what you learned from this video. I'd love to hear, and if you have a question you can
leave that in the comments below. My name is John Locke. My business Lockedown SEO
and I'm here about once a week making videos. That's all I have for now. Until next time, peace.