How To Use 301 Redirects? A Quick Guide

Today we are learning about 301 Redirects. If you are a web developer or SEO expert, you may already hard about 301 Redirects. Simply it helps manage and create 301 Redirects for your WordPress site to improve SEO and visitor experience. Before explaining 301 Redirects, let us explain what is Redirects.

According to Wikipedia “URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, is a World Wide Web technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address. When a web browser attempts to open a URL that has been redirected, a page with a different URL is opened.”

Explaining 301 Redirects

When the originally requested has been removed, a 301 redirect is a way of sending website visitors to a live URL. Normally, WordPress users create redirects to the most relevant or similar live page to the one that is no longer available or needed. Here is a simple example to understand 301 Redirects.

https://www.example.com/oldpost.html

https://www.example.com/newpost.html

You no longer need the first URL but you want to send visitors from that page to the new one, you can use 301 Redirects. It tells the browser “This page has moved permanently to a new page. Here is the new one”. Browser says “Sure, I’ll send the user there right now!”.

When Should You Use 301 Redirects?

I think now you understand what is 301 Redirects. Now it’s time to learn when should you use 301 Redirects.

• You are moving to a new domain and you want to redirect the old domain visitors to the new one.
• You have a blog post with old content and you no longer need this. You created a new blog post and you need to redirect the old blog post visitors to the new one.

Redirects and SEO

Redirects are not bad for SEO, well it depends. If you are using 301 Redirects, you should care about it otherwise a bad implementation might cause all kinds of trouble, from loss of PageRank to loss of traffic. I think you already know Google uses PageRank internally to rank web pages.

Don’t Confuse with 302 Redirects

301 Redirect and 302 Redirect, both are different. Use a 301 redirect to permanently redirect a URL to a new destination and 302 redirects is a temporary one.

What’s an easy way to manage redirects in WordPress?

Which is the best way to manage redirects in WordPress? The best is to use a WordPress redirect manager. One of the best WordPress 301 Redirect Plugin we ever used is 301 Redirects – Easy Redirect Manager By WebFactory Ltd.

The Plugin is free to use and comes with awesome features such as Super-fast redirection, Import/Export feature for bulk redirects management and have the option to do redirects from Choose from Pages, Posts, Custom Post Types, etc.

If you have a large site running with a lot of pages, chances are great you have some links pointing to a dead URL. Better to find those URLs using online tools and set up 301 redirects. Visit My WP Tips to learn more interesting things related to WordPress.