Hosting a Search Engine Friendly Site - Other ways to implement the 301 redirect:

1. To redirect ALL files on your domain use this in your .htaccess file if you are on a Unix Web server:
   
   redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
   redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
   
   You can also use one of these in your .htaccess file:
   
   redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
   redirect permanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
   redirectpermanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
   
   This will redirect "index.html" to another domain using a 301-Moved permanently redirect.
   
   
2. If you need to redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com and you've got mod_rewrite enabled on
   your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:
   
   Options +FollowSymLinks
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule ^(.*).htm$ $1.html [R=301,L]
   
   or this:
   
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
   
   Tip: Use your full URL (ie http://www.domain.com) when obtaining incoming links to your site. Also use your full URL for the internal linking of your site.
   
   
3. If you want to redirect your .htm pages to .php pages and you've got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:
   
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php
   
   
4. If you wish to redirect your .html or .htm pages to .shtml pages because you are using Server Side Includes (SSI) add this code to your .htaccess file:
   
   AddType text/html .shtml
   AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html .htm
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
   DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html

Frequently Asked Question:

What's the difference in using a 301 redirect versus a meta redirect?

Meta Redirect

To send someone to a new page (or site) put this in the head of your
document:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;
url=http://mynewsite.com/">

Content="10; tells the browser to wait 10 seconds before transfer, choose however long you would like, you can even choose 0 to give a smoother transition, but some (really old) browsers aren't capable of using this so I'd suggest putting a link on that page to your new site for them.

With a meta redirect the page with the redirect issues a 200 OK status and some other mechanism moves the browser over to the new URL. With a 200 OK on both pages, the search engine wants to index both the start page and the target page - and that is a known spam method (set up 10,000 domains full of keywords for the search engines to index then meta redirect the "real visitor" after 0 or 1 seconds to the "real site" ) so using it gets you penalized.

The 301 redirect simply issues a Permanently Moved message in the HTTP header which tells the search engine to only index the target URL.

Conclusion: The safest way to redirect old Web pages to the new pages or old website to the new website and keep the same search engine rankings is to use the 301 redirect. It will also pass on the page rank from your old site to your new site.  

Next: How to design a search engine friendly website >>
 

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