What is a 301 Redirect?
Saturday, March 28th, 2009A 301 redirect is the code 301 sent by the server and redirecting the webpage browser (or spider) to another page. Technically, 301 means “Moved Permanently“, so this will cause most search engines to update their index with the new page if encountered. A 302 redirect on the other hand is temporary (“Temporarily Moved”) and shouldn’t be used in place of a 301 redirect.
If you have moved a web page on your site, and you want to redirect users and search engines to the new page and location, you can use a 301 redirect to accomplish this. Any time a user goes to the old page, they will be automatically redirected to the new page.
This can be accomplished using PHP, meta header tags, or more commonly an htaccess file. Some web hosts also offers options in there control panel to enter redirections (old page to new) and some CMS are also able to handle this also using plugins or build in components. If you know how to write URL rewrites, this should be fairly easy. Any time you move a page or change a folder on your site, always use a 301 redirect.