How to Use 301 Redirects to Redirect a Domain

A 301 redirect is a status code your web server recognises as a web page or link that has permanently moved to another location. To find out what Matt Cutts of Google thinks of 301 redirects, please check out the following web pages:

• Google’s Matt Cutts Talks About Redirected Links & Nofollowed Links
• How to Know if a 301 Redirect Counts

301 Redirect a Domain

The simplest way to create 301 redirects for an entire web site would be to create .htaccess file with the command below and upload it to the public folder of your web site.

The “#” sign is a comment syntax for the .htaccess file. In my example, I was redirecting my old blog, VincentRich.com, to MaverickWebCreations.com. The slash (/) after “redirect 301″ tells the Apache server to redirect all HTTP requests on VincentRich.com to MaverickWebCreations.com. Please note that the slash (/) behind the URL is very important! If you omit this, your redirects are going to be messed up.

301 Redirect Web Pages

Sometimes we want to redirect visitors to the new page on our new web site. If this is what you are trying to achieve, you need to enter 1 commands for every URL you wish to redirect.

For my case, I decided that I wanted to redirect all my old blog posts to a specific blog post on MaverickWebCreations.com. The command for this is as follows:

redirect 301 /filename.html http://www.newdomain.com/filename.html

This would be a lot of work if you have a lot of URLs to redirect but it would be worth the trouble in the long run as you do not want to lose traffic.

301 Redirect HTTP Codes on HTML Pages

You may also do a 301 redirect on a HTML page as long as you include the HTTP status codes.

Wikipedia has a great article on how to do this. In fact, I created a file titled “index.html” for my old blog and included the 301 redirect status code at the top of the page to let the search engines know that my site has moved. However, this HTML page does not redirect visitors automatically.