Isn't 301 Redirection too simple to talk about here?
I would say "yes" other than the fact that most web designers don't realize that there really is a good reason to use 301 redirects.
I started using 301 redirects when I changed the layout of this very page on disk. It seemed to me that it would be simpler and cleaner for my end-users to only see the directory for the subject they were interested in instead of having the URL include whatever.shtml.
When I first did the switch, I lost a good chunk of traffic and got a whole bunch of 404 errors in my logs. This was simply because the rest of the world (and most importantly, the search engines) only knew about the old format. The solution to this problem is redirects. Redirects both automatically move your end user over to the new correct page and tells any automated system crawling your page that the location of that particular content has changed. This gives the crawler a chance to update its database.
Maybe this isn't a terrible idea. How do I do it?
There are a couple of way to do redirects:
- Put the redirect in the header of the old location
- Tell Apache directly that the content has moved.
Put it in the source
To redirect in the page source, you have to add an "http-equiv" meta tag to the header of the page you want redirected. In this example, a flat page is redirected to a perl script.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/cgi-bin/index.pl"> <title>Index Redirect</title> <body> </body> </head> </html>
The main problem with this style is that you have to keep files around in the old locations to do the redirect. In my opinion, this pretty much defeats the purpose of doing the redirect. This problem is solved in the next method.
Let Apache do the thinking
Apache allows user access to be defined on a case by case basis. This is accomplished through the use of .htaccess files. Apache's Tutorial covers very well when and how to use .htaccess files, so I'm not going to go into that here. Basically, you need to put something like the following into a .htaccess in the root directory of wherever you will be redirecting from.
redirect 301 /motov400.shtml http://www.wolfteck.com/motov400/ redirect 301 /vprmatrix220a5.shtml http://www.wolfteck.com/vprmatrix220a5/ redirect 301 /ze4200.shtml http://www.wolfteck.com/ze4200/
This sets up the redirection of three of my old pages to their current locations.
Well, that was easy
Yes, it was. And now you know.
Last updated: Sunday, 20-Sep-2009 16:55:49 CDT
Contact me at randall dot will at gmail dot com
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