Somebody Call 911! We’ve got a 301 Emergency!

Eric Vreeland
Eric Vreeland

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As an inbound marketer you should know that inbound links are as good as gold.  Inbound links are the key to securing a high position on the search engine result pages for the keywords you are targeting and getting more visitors, more leads, and more customers.  That’s the reason you slave away for hours crafting the perfect blog post, coming up with the perfect title, and making sure all your On-Page and Off-Page SEO is aligned.  Now what if I told you that I was only going to give you credit for half of the hard work you just did?  That wouldn’t be very fair would it, but that’s why you need to make sure that you set up a 301 Redirect!

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What is a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect is also known as a permanent redirect.  When you use a 301 redirect it tells your browser or more importantly the search engines “Hey the page you are looking for is actually at this URL…oh and it’s going to be there permanently.” 

Why is a 301 redirect the best?

The reason a 301 redirect is the only redirect you should be using is because search engines will allow all of the SEO credit from on URL to pass through to the other.  This is because of its “permanent” status.  If you choose to use another form of redirect, the search engines will not pass the SEO credit and you will be splitting it between the two URLs.

An Example:

The most obvious example of how forgetting to set up a 301 redirect can hurt your SEO is by looking at the difference between http:// www.yourawesomecompany.com and http://yourawesomecompany.com .  Although, both of these URLs will generally go to the same page, if you don’t have a 301 redirect set up the search engines will actually recognize them as two separate sites.  That means that whenever someone links to the “www” URL that site will be credited for the inbound link, and anytime someone links to the URL without “www” the other site will be credited.  So instead of splitting the credit for all your hard work, take the 10 minutes and set up your 301 redirect .

How to check if you have a 301 redirect set up:

The easiest way to check if your site has a 301 redirect set up is to head over to our Website Grader .  Just type in your URL to get your website graded, and we'll give you lots of SEO tips for your website including whether or not you need to set up a 301 redirect.  If a 301 redirect is not found you'll see an error message under section E that looks like this. 

301 redirect, website grader error

Photo Credit: davidsonscott15


seo audit
Topics: Technical SEO

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