A redirect automatically pushes Web-site visitors from one page to another. It's most often used when changing the information architecture of a site (i.e. moving a page to another section; removing a page and redirecting anyone who bookmarked it to a new page), or when moving content between domains (i.e. moving an article from your blog to your corporate site).

Redirects can be individual pages, assets or directories, but they can also be used for entire sites or domains.

How is a redirect accomplished?

There are many ways to complete redirects, but the one and only correct way to redirect visitors from one page to another is via a 301 redirect. 301 redirects are controlled on the server side, with Internet Information Services (IIS) or a .htaccess file. While pushing all visitors to the proper page, a redirect also tells the search engine spiders that it's a permanent relocation of page "a" to page "b" and the only page that counts now is "b".

How do redirects affect SEO?

Any redirect achieved by any method other than using a server-side 301 redirect runs the risk of negatively affecting your search indexing and ranking, including meta redirects. Incorrect redirects can be flagged as duplicate content if a spider actually has the chance to index the originating page and can often be flagged as spam. Why? Because redirects are a common way for spammers to send someone from a URL that appears to be on the up-and-up to a less legitimate location. That being said, it's fine to use meta redirects as a short-term solution, especially as a stop-gap to prevent visitors or spiders from landing on your 404 page (Page Not Found error page) when the page they're looking for no longer exists.

How are redirects used for non-www domains?

An important redirect that is often missed and should be considered for every site is the domain redirect of the non-www domain to the www domain or vice-versa (i.e., pushing all traffic from example.com to www.example.com). Most sites are set up by default to direct multiple "headers" to a single location, making all versions of a domain point to one primary site on the server. This setup is standard practice and ensures that anyone typing your domain in either format (www vs. non-www) will arrive at the correct location. The problem with leaving your site in this state is that you're essentially providing multiple domains for the site and someone visiting your site using either the www or non-www will continue to travel through your site via the domain name entered.

Want to see if this is happening on your site? Open two browser windows or tabs and type your Web site URL in both, one starting with www and the other without. Does one version end up changing to the other (i.e. does example.com get changed to www.example.com) or do they both remain as originally entered?

Although this might not affect the visitor experience, it's not uncommon for the search engines to crawl and index the www and non-www versions of your site separately. Although you won't be penalized for duplicate content, it will definitely dilute your results in the search engine results pages (SERPs). And, not only will you lose some link authority (link juice), you'll essentially be competing against yourself for the same keywords.

Google has recently made an effort to reduce the need to do a 301 redirect of your www to your non-www domain by including a "picker" option within Google Webmaster Tools. Once you've signed up and verified your Web site with Google, you can tell Google which "version" of your site you consider to be your primary version and then Google will merge all indexing and traffic information they gather from crawling your site into the version you choose – eliminating the problem of diluted site performance in the SERPs caused by having multiple versions of your Web site.

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About the Author

Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist at Lyris. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance.

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