Time for a little server geek speak: Here’s the scenario, you need to move or change a page or page extension on your website and DON’T want to lose any valuable SEO horsepower that the particular page may have had… What are your options?  Welcome redirects:

Scenario 1: Temporary move.  Not honestly sure why you would ever need to temporarily move a page, but God knows there must be a reason or they wouldn’t have invented it.  Use a 302 Redirect in your .htaccess file. This alerts Google that it’s not a permanent move.

Scenario 2:Permanent move.  Ok, the page name has changed, the page extension has changed, you need to tell Google that the x page is now y page.  Use a 301 redirect.  The 301 redirect will tell Google to transfer page rank, etc. to the newly named page. Also, if people still find that page in the organic search engine listings, once clicked, it will take them to the new page automatically. Cool stuff.

How to set it up:

If on a Linux hosting environment, you’ll need to alter the .htaccess file which should be in the root of your web directory.

Step 1: Connect to your web server with FTP, download the .htaccess using ASCII mode with your FTP program.

Step 2: Open the .htaccess in notepad: add the following line for a 301: (make sure you change the URL below)
redirect 301 /youroldpage.php3 http://www.yournewpage.com/newpage.php

Step 3:Save the .htaccess file and upload using ASCII mode to your web server.

Step 4: I’ve learned this the hard way: ALWAYS switch your ftp program back to AUTO or Binary mode for file transfers.  Uploading JPG’s in ASCII mode doesn’t work very well.

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Tags: 301 redirects, 302 redirects