Due to one reason or the other, you have to move your emails or website to some other web address. In such a situation, you need to forward your old URL to the new one, which means moving or redirecting your mail or web address to the new URL. This process of sending or forwarding is known as Redirection. Generally, there are three types of redirects:
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301, “Moved Permanently”—recommended for SEO
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302, “Found” or “Moved Temporarily”
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Meta Refresh
What is 301 Redirect?
The word “redirect” basically means sending both the search engines and users to a different URL from the original one. In order to permanently move your website address, you need to apply 301 redirect to your existing page. 301 is an important yet essential tool, which is required to maintain the performance of your website giving users as well as search engines the appropriate version of a particular web page (or all web pages). 301 refers to the HTTP status code, which is the best technique for implementing permanent redirects on a website.
301 redirect is significant in order to maintain SEO value of the website. Apart from this, it is also important to maintain domain authority of a website. It will directly send the user and search engines to the different URL chosen from search engine result page or the one user originally typed in the browser.
How Is 301 Redirect useful?
There are certain circumstances and situations in which redirection proves beneficial to you. These include:
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If you have moved your website to a new domain, you can make the transition seamless through 301 redirects.
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If people access your website through several different URLs for example home page can be reached in multiple ways – 1. http://www.impingesolutions.com/home, 2. http://home.impingesolutions.com, 3. http://www.impingesolutions.com, then it is perfect to choose one of those URLs as your canonical (preferred) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your selected URL.
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If you are merging two websites and want to ensure that links to obsolete URLs are forwarded to the correct pages, then also 301 redirects is your probable solution.
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You can also use 301 redirects to clean up dynamic URLs and redirect them to shorter search engine friendly versions.
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You can avoid duplicate content problems that are commonly caused by www and non-www versions of your pages, along with other common reasons of duplicate content.
How Is 301 Redirection Applied?
Those who have registered Linux hosting package with a domain, they can set up a 301 redirect using an .htaccess file. This will catch traffic on your old website and redirect it to your new indexed site. Here’s how to set up a 301 redirect:
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Open Notepad or some other text editor.
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Copy the following code into your text editor, replacing http://www.example.com/ with the URL you wish to send your users and search engines.
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Save the file as .htaccess.
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Upload this file to your web space.
If you wish to redirect the www version of your website to the non www version of website and avoid showing your website to www URL, you need to do the following steps:
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Open a text editor such as “Notepad”.
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Copy the following code into your text editor, replacing http://www.example.com/ and example.com with your domain name.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
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Save the file as .htaccess.
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Upload the file to your web space.
For detail Check out this Reference.