Skip to Main Content
The Art of SEO
book

The Art of SEO

by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola
October 2009
Beginner content levelBeginner
602 pages
19h 50m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from The Art of SEO

Redirects

A redirect is used to indicate when content has moved from one location to another. For example, you may have some content at http://www.yourdomain.com/old.html and decide to restructure your site. As a result of this move, your content may move to http://www.yourdomain.com/critical-keyword.html.

Once a redirect is implemented users who go to the old versions of your pages (perhaps via a bookmark they kept for the page) will be sent to the new versions of those pages. Without the redirect, the user would get a Page Not Found (404) error. With the redirect, the web server tells the incoming user agent (whether a browser or a spider) to instead fetch the requested content from the new URL.

Why and When to Redirect

Redirects are also important for letting search engines know when you have moved content. After doing so, the search engines will continue to have the old URL in their index and return it in their search results. The solution to this is to implement a redirect. Here are some scenarios in which you may end up needing to implement redirects:

  • You have old content that expires, so you remove it.

  • You find that you have broken URLs that have links and traffic.

  • You change your hosting company.

  • You change your CMS.

  • You want to implement a canonical redirect (redirect all pages on http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com).

  • You change the URLs where your existing content can be found for any reason.

Not all of these scenarios require a redirect. For example, you can change ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Rand Fishkin, Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola
The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola
SEO Management

SEO Management

Véronique Duong

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596809133Errata Page