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Why Redirect?

I’ve noticed on several blogs and forums lately people who are moving their sites worry about keeping visitors as well as page rank. Getting people to change their bookmarks is hard and what about those who have you in feeds?

To make it easier on your visitors and more importantly to keep your PR and Alexa ranking, having a redirect is essential.

Just recently, I purchased a new domain name for my photo blog. My old name had very little to do with photography and I absolutely hated the way I had set it up, so determined early on that I wanted to move the photos to a new URL. Since I call that site Travelin’ Show, I really wanted a url that used those words in some form.  I had determined that someone had it that wasn’t using it, so emailed them and lo and behold a few months later, the URL became available and I wasted no time in snatching it up. Now I have the URL I wanted for my photo blog — www.travelinshow.com — but I already had the blog itself set up at www.msns-blogs.com/blog (see — I told you it was a dumb url!!).

Even though the two sites are on the exact same server, pointing my visitors over to the new URL was going to be essential in keeping them. I’m not fortunate enough to have all that many — mostly family if you want the truth of the matter.

I knew about redirections, but wasn’t sure exactly how to do it. Fortunately, a quick search found plenty of step-by-step articles on how to write the 301 redirect code in my .htaccess file.

If your server doesn’t support .htaccess or you’re on a free host such as blogspot, there are other methods of redirecting using javascript, meta refresh and php. Several of these methods are clearly explained at the WebWorkShop.

I instituted a 301 redirect on msns-blogs.com/blog which pointed everyone — bots, visitors et al over to the new url, www.travelinshow.com. It wasn’t hard to do and just involved adding a bit of code to my .htaccess file on the old site.

I found a great article at Perishable Press on how to redirect my feeds as well. So now everything is all neat and tidy at the Traveln’ Show!

More Reasons for Redirect

Moving isn’t the only reason you should have  a redirect.

Have you noticed that some sites come up with the www.sitename.extension while others just come up sitename.extension? That’s another place you want to have a 301 redirect command in your .htaccess file. By having this redirect you consolidate links to the correct page and give yourself some additional strength.

Just be careful with where you put that redirect as I found to my dismay that putting it in the outer folder of  the wordpress files makes it impossible for you to sign into your admin panel.   You want this .htacess redirect to be in your wp-content/themes/yourtheme folder.

Check Your Headers for Redirects

It’s wise to check your headers from time to time for redirect codes. Plugins can sometimes write these to your headers or malicious access can also write them and you want to make sure that any code that’s there is what you wrote and implemented.

Stepforth.com has a header checker tool that will tell you what’s in your header and provides an excellent guide on what the results mean.

So are you redirecting properly?
Did you run the header checker tool to see if you’re redirecting people?
Did this article help you understand the basics of redirection?
What else could I have included to help you with your specific issue?

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