To let every one know how big of a headache a 301 redirect is my rankings completely disappeared over a month ago, we did a 301 from http://www.indianawebsitedesign.net to http://www.dewittsmedia.com and things are just now starting to come back I notice several of our competitive keywords are on page 3 and slightly moving up, but I’m thinking it could be another month if not longer for things to “completely” level out. This is something every one should be aware of, and to be caution when doing one and don’t get stressed out because it does take time for them to sort out you could have a very high traffic getting website, but as soon as that 301 redirect kicks in you will lose pratically all of if for awhile.

Tips on Redirecting.

1. Make sure you do the redirect at a time when your not busy or I should say at a busy time of the year, so in other words have a budget set back when you do this 301 redirect cause if your depending on the search engines for business you’ll lose a lot of it for awhile.
2. Header Check, Yes thats right soon as you do the redirect make sure that you run a header check on the url to make sure its reading a 301 permanent move you can find a 301 header check tool at SEO Consultants 301 redirect check this is the one I use for any site were going to redirect just to “make sure” things are correct.
3. Keep old domain, yes don’t do anything silly like I have seen people do in the pass once you have all them inbound links into the old domain or I should say the domain your redirecting always keep this domain registered if you unregister the domain you will lose all your links coming from that site. I have heard people asking and have seen where people thought they could just automatically drop the old domain after a long period of time and this is wrong you need to always keep that old domain active as long as you want to keep the link juice from that domain and links.
4. Keep your site structure the exactly the same. Don’t go changing folder names, file names or anything to that nature if you use the proper 301 you can use a few lines of code and the whole website will redirect including inner folders if you look at the bottom of this article it has some articles on how to do a 301, and etc.
5. Htaccess method I would prefer to use the htacces and nothing else. If your redirect consist of the whole website use the htaccess technique I have seen where some people thought they had to put a php 301 redirect on every page which would take considerably for ever speaking you have a large website.

The headache of a 301 redirect is crazy at first I was thinking my website got penalized, but then I was thinking for what I was like duh use common sense you just did a 301. It really caught me off guard though because I did not think it was going to take this long for things to start to go back to normal, and there no even close, but I finally am starting to see progress coming very fast now. So keep in mind it takes time for every thing to level out when you do a 301 redirect keep in mind there is no way of speeding the process up.

The best way to test to see if your 301 redirect is effective is to 301 redirect a single page, or folder then see what the outcome of it is. For example 301 redirect a inner page keep in mind what keywords that page was ranking for and then do the redirect give it some time and see if it comes up in the search engines for the same keywords if so then you should be ok. Once you see the 301 working on 1 page go ahead and redirect the whole website, but generally 301’s work all the time well they should anyways, but I have heard of people having problems with them. It just takes time thats the down fall you would think Google and other search engines would have some way of identifying the 301 automatically and boom it completes soon as it hits the old domain and just automatically adjust the links to, so this comes to tell me Google is on some type of pointing system in a different way hard to explain what I’m trying to state.

How to 301 Redirect Articles Below

Permanent Redirect with Http 301
301 Redirect in Apache, .htacess and IIS
301 Redirect permanent Tutorial
Redirecting using 301 Headers
How to know if your 301 redirect counts

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 4:35 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.