Why Everyone Should be an Expert of 301 Redirects

1. WHY EVERYONE SHOULD BE AN EXPERT IN 301 REDIRECTS Keep traffic and SEO flowing with these magical links.

2. A 301 REDIRECT IS A STATUS CODE THAT TELLS SEARCH ENGINES THAT A PAGE/POST HAS PERMANENTLY MOVED TO A NEW LOCATION. IT ASKS THE SEARCH ENGINES TO TRANSFER PRIOR SEO HISTORY TO THE NEW PIECE OF CONTENT AND AT THE SAME TIME IT PUSHES WEBSITE TRAFFIC TO THIS NEW LOCATION.

3. THE BENEFITS OF USING 301 REDIRECTS 1. Preserves SEO by saving 90-99% of “link juice” 2. Referral traffic is protected 3. Social media traffic is protected 4. Internal links will continue to work until updated 5. The website (or blog) is clean and without a ton of 404 errors Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

4. WHEN SHOULD YOU USE A 301 REDIRECT? o You’ve moved your site to a new domain and you want to make sure both traffic and SEO history is routed to the new destination. o You’ve moved to a new CMS platform and the URL structured changed in the migration. o You’ve changed a URL (page, post, product, category, etc.) and you want your existing PageRank to transfer to the new URL. o You’ve changed a URL and you want your traffic to the old URL rerouted to the new URL. o You’re merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages. Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

5. Not sure what PageRank is? It’s simply a number from 0-10 which is assigned by Google. This number is an indication of how good your overall SEO is for a given piece of content. PageRank is a minor part of Google’s algorithm and it is changed only a few times a year. Google would display this data for website owners in past years, but the visibility of it was taken away earlier this year. While it still exists, we cannot see our PageRank value. Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

6. 301 REDIRECT SCENARIOS o PinkPuppy.com is being replaced by PurpleKitty.com o PinkPuppy.com and PurpleKitty.com are being merged into CrazyAnimals.com o HubSpot account is being deactivated and all legacy content is getting migrated to WordPress o Your SEO consultant finally convinced you to move your blog from blog.crazyanimals.com to crazyanimals.com/blog/ o You’ve sold part of your business and you need to migrate this content to it’s new owner (such as WSM theme store sale to 9seeds) o You removed blog categories from blog permalink structure o You deleted a really old blog post o Your SEO consultant discovered your 1,700 tags and is forcing you to remove 1,650 of them (yep this really happened last month for me) Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

14. 301 REDIRECT EXAMPLE: DELETE EXCESSIVE BLOG TAGS Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com CrazyAnimals.com/tag/duck CrazyAnimals.com/tag/duckies CrazyAnimals.com/tag/ducck Chickens Horses Goats Alpacas CrazyAnimals.com/tag/ducks

15. WAYS YOU CAN MANAGE 301 REDIRECTS 1. .htaccess file 2. Hosting Account 3. WordPress plugins such as Redirecton or Yoast 4. SquareSpace URL Shortcut 5. Wix Site Manager Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

16. MANAGING 301 REDIRECTS: .HTACCESS FILE To implement a 301 redirect for websites that are hosted on servers running Apache, you’ll need access to your server’s .htaccess file. For non-programmers, this can be a bit scary. While my coding team effortlessly manages .htaccess files, they scare me beyond words. Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

17. MANAGING 301 REDIRECTS: HOSTING ACCOUNT If you are using WP Engine hosting, you can also use this to set up 301 redirects right within your WP Engine dashboard. The set up on WP Engine is also intuitive and I’m not afraid to use it, so the regular user should be okay to venture into their account and add the necessary 301 redirects. There is a quick tutorial to assist in these efforts. Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

18. MANAGING 301 REDIRECTS: WORDPRESS PLUGIN - REDIRECTION This plugin is very intuitive and is easy enough for any website owner or blogger to use. It also supports mass 301 redirect imports, which I use often. Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com If you are using WordPress, you can use a plugin like Redirection to set up 301 redirects right from within your dashboard.

19. MANAGING 301 REDIRECTS: WORDPRESS PLUGIN – YOAST SEO The plugin also tells you when you’re about to create a redirect that will result in a redirect loop. This looping is something you want to avoid at all costs. Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com Yoast’s premium version allows you to set up 301 redirects and it even reminds you to do so.

21. MANAGING 301 REDIRECTS: SQUARESPACE URL SHORTCUTS In SquareSpace you can rename URLs within your site using the URL Rewrite. You can also choose to create an on-domain 301 or 302 redirect or an external redirect to point to an external site page. Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

22. MANAGING 301 REDIRECTS: WIX PREMIUM SITE MANAGER To set up a 301 redirect you must first upgrade your site to a Premium Plan and connect a domain to your It is not possible to use a source link with a # in the URL. You can create a maximum of 200 301 redirects per Wix site. Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

23. 301 REDIRECTS MUST BE IN PLACE WHEN THE URL CHANGE OCCURS OR IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE UPDATE. YOU CANNOT ADD REDIRECTS A WEEK LATER AND EXPECT GOOGLE TO ADHERE TO THE REQUEST AND PASS PAGERANK. BY THAT TIME YOUR CONTENT COULD ALREADY BE GONE FROM THE INDEX AND ALL SEO VALUE LOST. ImportantNote

24. GOOGLE RECOMMENDS THAT YOU LEAVE 301 REDIRECTS IN PLACE FOR ONE YEAR BEFORE REMOVING THEM. ImportantNote

25. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND EXTRA CREDIT READING support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en moz.com/learn/seo/redirection searchenginejournal.com/choose-canonical-vs-301-redirect/174904/ peopleshost.com/2017/05/permanent-301-redirect-htaccess-code-example/ mediatemple.net/community/products/grid/204643080/how-do-i-redirect-my-site-using- a-htaccess-file Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com

26. ANY QUESTIONS?

27. ADDITIONAL OPTIONS FOR ADVANCING YOUR SEO KNOWLEDGE Copyright Web Savvy Marketing, All Rights Reserved RebeccaGill.com Grab one of the remaining seats for October’s mastermind sessions. web-savvy-marketing.com/mastermind/ Take my online course and learn SEO at your own pace. diySEOcourses.com Listen to my weekly SEO podcast and grab SEO tips while you’re on the go. SEObits.fm Join my private Facebook group and get answers from me and your peers. facebook.com/groups/seolaunchpad/

Why Everyone Should be an Expert of 301 Redirects

Rebecca Gill

Why Everyone Should be an Expert of 301 Redirects