If there ever comes the time when you redesign your Website completely, unfortunately search engines will not be very sympathetic about that. Suppose you move a page from http://mysite.com/news/iphone to http://mynewdomain.com/tech-news/iphone. If the search engines already indexed your original Website hyperlinks and your Website’s fans bookmarked some of your Webpages, you will want to redirect them to the new URL.
One of the best ways to redirect search engines and Website visitors to a new Webpage location is by using 301 redirects. You can configure Apache with the Redirect directive to redirect traffic from an old url to a new one. The Redirect directive takes several arguments
- redirect code
- original URL location
- destination URL
You can set the status as a numeric HTTP code. HTTP code 301 represents a permanent change.
By using 301 Redirects you will let the search engines know that this is a new, permanent location and you might keep your search engine ranking. Keep in mind that any changes to your Website navigation structure can negatively influence your search engine rankings.
Create a new .htaccess or in your current .htaccess file.
To redirect a specific URL to a new URL
Redirect 301 /news/iphone http://mynewdomain.com/tech-news/iphone
To redirect everything from your original domain name to a new domain name.
Redirect 301 / http://mynewdomain.com
Upload the .htaccess file to your server. Make sure do include the dot on the filename “.htaccess”
Tags: Apache, Search Engine Optimization