MH1 Web Design Blog

by Mike Hallaron
MH1 Web Design and Hallaron PR

Why use a domain redirect?

There are many reasons to redirect your website URLs. 

1. If web pages have moved but their old URLs are still saved in customers bookmarks or among the search engine indexes. Without redirection, their visits will lead to a 404 Error Page.
2. If you own several different extensions of your business URL, such as… .com, .net, .biz, etc… set a redirect for each domain to the main website.
3. Perhaps you have different websites for each division of your company. Each division may have its own individual domain name.

Creating a 301 Redirect

You can usually create redirects using your web host’s control panel. We offer this feature through our MH1 Web Hosting cPanel. This is the easiest way for our client’s to implement a 301 redirect. Other methods involve accessing a file called ‘.htaccess’  in your hosting directory. This file contains instructions for browsers and search engine spiders on how to handle specific requests. However, modifications to the .htaccess are best left to programmers and web designers.

From Google and Yahoo’s perspective, 301 redirects are the only acceptable way to redirect URLs.  If you have moved your website pages to a new URL, the search engines will index only the new URL, but will transfer link popularity from the old URL to the new one so that search engine rankings are not affected. The same behavior occurs when additional domains are set to point to the main domain through a 301 redirect. This is a phenomenal feature and makes 301 redirects your only avenue for keeping your SEO advantage and search engine rankings.

The URL Forwarding Feature

Most domain registrars such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions offer a feature called URL Forwarding. With this feature, you can register a new domain, such as ‘mydomain.net’, and have it point to mydomain.com (or to any other URL).  The problem, however, is that registrars usually do this by implementing a 302 redirect (page moved temporarily). While Google handles 302 redirects very well, passing link popularity from the additional domain to the main one, other search engines don’t do this well, diluting link popularity by splitting it between the two domains, and negatively affecting rankings.  Therefore, it is better not to use this method, and implement a 301 redirect instead.

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