Safeguarding Your SEO With URL Remapping

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July 14, 2008 by James
Filed under: Internet Marketing, SEO 

SEO permalinksRemapping Your URL and Safeguarding Your SEO

In the last article I discussed the merits of actively designing your website URL to support SEO. At the end of the article I promised to explain how we can change or remap the URL and how we can do this to avoid losing our search engine ranking

Since the focus of this article is to show you how to do things right, I will not explain how to use the 404 not found page, or the less than helpful “We’ve moved” redirection pages. Nope, I’m going to go straight to the heart of the matter…

*TIP* Search engines generally do not like redirection pages. If they see a redirection page when spidering your site, your old URL will be deleted from their index. Wherever possible, you want to keep your old URL in the index as long as you can because it takes time before your new URL is listed in the search engines.

The Heart of the Matter

So page redirects are bad mojo, the “ideal” way to proceed is using something called a 301 Redirect. I know, it sounds similar but it’s a whole different beastie and is the preferred way to handle the changes to a URL.

*WARNING*

Implementing a 301 Redirect does require you get under the hood of your system and edit a rather important file called the “.htaccess” file.

Using .htaccess for Redirection

When using the Apache web server (typical on most Unix, Linux and other Unix-derivative web hosts), directory-specific .htaccess files (as well as apache’s main configuration files) can be used.

Here’s what a line of code within the file would look like to redirect a single page:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

Rinse and Repeat

Now simply add one line for every page and URL within your website. Of course… if you have a blog with only a few pages and posts it’s not a problem. If you have a site (like I did) with hundreds of valid URL’s then the idea of manually editing the dot-htaccess is not for the faint of heart.

And yes… there are other programmatic ways to achieve this, but they too edit and manage the same file and so I decided to tell you how to do it manually. Of course, if you wish to experiment with automation code yourself, be warned… your dot-htaccess file is the master gatekeeper. Mess that file up and you could lock yourself out of your own website!

Good news…

Website Transition Planning is a service I offer. If you would like to update your URL design to reflect a more SEO friendly design then contact me. No coding knowledge required :)

PS. Moving your website has the same implications too - more actually. Do NOT think you can just load the files on another host and change the DNS… That is SEO suicide and you may end up losing a lot more than you think!

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