Planning to move to a new domain but worried about the fall in search engine traffic? Redirecting to a new location might invite search engine penalties? Earlier this dilemma prevented webmasters from moving in to newer and well created websites. This has become a thing of the past 301 redirects have come to the rescue of the webmasters. 301 redirects are being widely used most efficient method for webpage redirection.

Search engine generated traffic constitutes a substantial percentage of traffic to any website and thus it should not be ignored at any cost. 301 redirects help in permanently moving to your new domain which over a period of time permanently directs all traffic to your new domain. All major search engine crawlers can easily interpret 301 redirects saving you the ordeal of thinking about them individually.

What makes 301 redirects so powerful is the fact that they are search engine friendly and do not invite any penalties which was a problem for most webmasters with the earlier redirecting methods. 301 redirects preserve your current search engine rankings when redirecting web pages or a website.

301 redirects are interpreted as moved permanently by the search engine crawlers and ensure that all the traffic is redirected to your new location. It works perfectly with all the web applications be it IIS, ColdFusion, HTML, PHP, ASP .NET, JSP, CGI and Ruby on Rails. The search engine crawlers also save the address pointed to by the redirection as the preferred address.

Following are a few of the advantages of 301 redirects:

·         301 redirects help you streamline your website and give your users a better user-experience without losing the web traffic.

·         You can ensure that your visitors will not access an obsolete version of your site.

·         301 redirects do not invite any penalty from the search engines and help in reducing duplicate content on the web which looks unprofessional.

·         It will also help you better the search engine traffic and ranking as your traffic generated will be the sum total of the old and the new for a brief period.

The 301 redirects may take weeks or months to become fully active and visitors will not access an obsolete version of your site. It is advisable for you to maintain your old domain and the posts to ensure that you don’t lose traffic. If you are a webmaster planning to redirect your website you don’t have a better option than a 301 redirect in the market.

Summary:  301 redirects are one of the best ways to redirect web pages and websites to newer locations permanently. They do not invite search engine penalty while redirecting the traffic to a new location.