How to Setup Redirect 301 for a New Web Site
March 25, 2009
Your web designer has built a new great looking website, it is signed off and it goes live. Great.
The next day your analytics package is showing a load of hits to 404 error pages. The day after your traffic has halved. Latter that day I get a phone call – I am losing touch with how often this has happened recently. Now don’t get me wrong it is good for me and my cash flow – but it is an easy fix – and even easier to fix before go live and the old site is just delete by someone.
If you use 301 redirects it keeps the equity of you website intact and each page stays indexed, traffic drops will be minimal – though they will still happen.
This is the layout for the 301
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.newsite.com/new-dynamic-page/
More often than not when new websites are being built they are transferring old static websites to a content management system of some sort – there are a lot of great one out there.
The first part of the redirect /oldpage.html is the file name for the old page – it is easy if you have a full site map just to drop all of these into a text file. The second part is the new page or one as similar as possible – if there is not one just use the root of the domain.
Save this file as htaccess.txt and keep a copy of it. Change the file name to .htaccess and upload to your server, check to make sure there is not an .htaccess file there already – many CMS generate their own .htaccess file. If there is a file there already download it and add your information to the file and upload again. Problem solved.
Redirection of URL’s is easy as seen above, so there should never be a reason for deleting a web page and letting visitors reach a 404 error page. Just in case a 404 is reached consider setting up a custom 404 page that helps your visitors when they do get there.
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