What will you do when you don’t like your domain name and decided to change it to a newer one?
Yes, you can simply change the domain name and point the new name server to the hosting.
But what about the traffic to your old domain?
Will it transfer from the old domain to the new domain automatically?
No! It won’t!
Unless you redirect your old domain to a new domain, search engines like Google and Bing won’t transfer your old domain traffic to the new domain.
If you don’t, it will be like you are starting from scratch.
You have to build your ranking from zero. Frustrating right?
This is when 301 redirect comes in handy.
It is a permanent redirect from an old web page to a newer one.
If you don’t redirect the old URLs indexed in Google respond with a 404.
That makes your User Experience worse. User Experience is an inevitable metric in Search Engine Optimization.
When do you change the URLs?
Usually, you change your URLs in the below scenarios:
- Reorganizing the Web Pages
- Changing the Domain Extension
- Changing the Domain Name
Reorganizing the web pages
Website structure is important for Search Engine Optimization.
Usually, when an SEO expert tries to optimize your website, they look for the site structure.
Let me explain what this site structure means.
abc.com/mysite means that you have created a subdirectory inside your primary directory in the hosting.
Whereas abc.com/mysite/blogs means that you have created a subdirectory called blogs inside a subdirectory called my site which is inside your primary directory.
If this structure is irregular, search engine sets that this domain is low quality and the user experience of this domain would be the worst.
So when SEO experts reorganize web pages, they literally change the URLs.
If we don’t do a 301 redirect to the newer ones, the traffic to the old URLs will be lost permanently.
Changing the domain extension
.com, .in, .edu, .net, .gov are called as domain extensions.
They determine what the site is all about.
Sometimes people work on .net and in the middle, they change their mind to have .com. abc.net is completely different from abc.com.
So to preserve the traffic we have to do a 301 redirect to the newer one.
Changing the domain
Sometimes people change their complete domain from abc.com to xyz.com.
301 redirect is an essential one here.
301 Redirect for Google and other search engines
Once search engines like Google started to crawl your site, it indexes every web page into its system.
When it feels that your web page is the best among all other web pages on a particular topic, it ranks your site in the top position for the particular keywords.
What if you changed your URL to a newer one and google still indexes the web pages?
When someone clicks on the URL, they will see a broken page or a 404 error.
This proves that your site offers a bad user experience.
So Google lowers the entire ranking of your website.
To avoid this you must provide a 301 redirect to the old URL.
Anyways, Google eventually indexes your new URL.
301 redirect for links and Referrals
You might have linked the old URL to your internal pages or some other external pages for link building.
If a web page has broken links it is considered to be serving with low quality.
The websites which added your links, start to remove them since they scan for the broken links frequently.
You will lose your backlinks if you don’t do a 301 redirect to the new URLs.
301 Redirect for bookmarks
Some might add your URL to their browser bookmarks.
Or you might have sent the links through emails.
There will be huge traffic from browser bookmarks and some other external resources.
You will miss it if you don’t do the redirects.
Conclusion
301 redirect is important to serve the best user experience to your audience and not to lose your hard-earned traffic.
Every time you update a URL or reorganize your website, redirect immediately to avoid search engine-related issues.
Hope you like this article.
Thanks for reading
