Which Redirect to Use – A Study by An Internet Marketing Agency India

October 21 2020

If you own a website, having an understanding of redirects is crucial. Whenever you need to change your URL structure, delete a web page or switch to a whole new domain – you need to redirect the URLs.

If you are not familiar with the concept of redirects or don’t yet know its efficacy, we are here to guide you. Imagine a scenario first. Say, you have engaged a PPC management company to promote a service or product and drive traffic to a dedicated landing page. Now, you had to change the URL structure for some technical issues. Can you understand what happens if the web traffic clicks on the ad? They will come to the landing page that no longer exists! Not only will it impact your sales and brand impression negatively, but it will also drown your PPC budget.

However, choosing the right redirect code is quite daunting at times. On the other hand, if you fail to do so, your SEO efforts will be negatively impacted. A redirect instructs the search engine robots to go to a different page – either permanently or temporarily. That way, it helps the search engine to crawl the new web page, index it, and rank it. As you can understand, a wrong redirect code will affect your webpage’s search engine ranking and the amount of traffic.

This leads us to craft this post. It will come in handy to understand which redirect you should use. Let’s dive in then.

How to Choose a Redirect – A Leading Internet Marketing Agency India Speaks

Before learning about the types of redirects, you should know a few situations that demand you to use the redirect codes. Each situation demands different codes. So it’s important to have deep knowledge about it.

You need a redirect code while:

Deleting a post or page
Fixing the issue of keyword cannibalization
Moving a site to a new domain
Updating or refreshing the content
Merging websites
Enabling permalink in WordPress
Changing your URL structure
Changing the CMS

So, these are the situations where you need to use distinct redirects.

HTTP Status Code

In order to understand the work process of the redirects, it’s crucial to know about HTTP status codes. This is basically a set number that a server sends to a browser on following the request for a web page. These codes may include 404, 301, 200, 503 – each code with a specific purpose. For example, 503 indicates that the server is temporarily unavailable due to overload or for maintenance, 404 means the page is not found, and so on.

The professionals at a leading Internet Marketing agency India explain that it’s important to remember a couple of redirects that you may come across on a daily basis. This means, as a website owner, you may also have to use these at some point or other. These are as follow:

301 Permanent

It is one of the most common redirect codes. Whenever you are permanently moving or deleting a page or changing the permalink structure, you need to use it. The code intimates the search engine robots that the requested page is no longer available at the URL and it should not be indexed anymore.

Up until this, a 301 redirect seems to be similar to 404, right? Even 404 redirect bars the search engine robots to crawl the page. The difference starts after this point. With a 404 error message, the visitors or the search engine stops at the requested page and bounce.

A 301 permanent redirect leads search engine robots and web visitors to a new URL. That way, it also passes all the link juice, search engine ranking, and traffic that the old URL accumulated to the new URL.

However, 301 redirect is not ideal for a temporary redirect.

302 Found

This is often used as a temporary code. It means that the requested content is found but it sits in a different location. However, if you use it for a long period of time, Google web crawler will consider it as a 301 permanent redirect.

307 Temporary

With the emergence of HTTP 1.1, 307 redirect code has replaced 302 redirect as a valid temporary redirect. 302 is a little vague as it only informs that the requested content is found at a different location. 307, on the other hand, clearly mentions that the requested URL is moved temporarily to a different location and will be back to the previous location in a while. You can use the code if you are certain of bringing the content back to the previous location shortly.

REGEX redirects

This is a complex redirect used mainly by the SEO professionals. With normal redirects, you have to specify a source URL and a destination URL. But with REGEX or regular expressions redirects, you can move a whole set of URLs to a new location through a single redirect code. This saves both time and efforts. That’s why SEO professionals prefer to use this for a massive SEO project.

However, it’s important to know the ins and outs of SEO redirects before using the complex one as it can break your site.

Now, we will talk about two more codes that are not technically redirects but often used in websites.

410 Content Deleted

404 page error is a bad signal to Google as it indicates poor maintenance. Other than producing a negative impact on the specific web page, the code also produces an adverse effect on the whole website’s SEO ranking and reliability. Instead of showing a 404 error on a deleted page, it’s better to move the traffic to a relevant web page through a 301 redirect. Note how we stressed on the relevance of the page where you are redirecting the traffic to. If visitors come to the page to buy a mobile phone cover and you lead them to an LED bulb page just because you sell it, that won’t make any sense. In fact, Google may penalize your site for affecting user experience.

Now, what if you don’t have a relevant page to lead the traffic to? Opt for a 410 redirect. This indicates that the page won’t return and the search engine can delete the page from the index.

451 content unavailable for legal reasons

In case of an unfortunate situation where you cannot display content or had to delete a web page for legal reasons, you can use a 451 header. This intimates that there was content for the request but it cannot be featured due to legal reasons.

Conclusion

We hope our guideline has been handy for you to pick the right redirect code for your website. However, if you don’t have adequate tech expertise, it’s better to engage professional SEO services. Otherwise, you may break the site structure and lose the hard-earned traffic and link juice.