What is a 301 Redirect? How to Use Them & Their SEO Impact

Sometimes you create a landing page or a blog post that you discover down the road you no longer need. But if you’re already seeing a lot of traffic go to that page, you don’t suddenly want to lead people to a dead page.

This is where a redirect comes in. With a redirect, like a 301 redirect, you can instead push that traffic to a different page or blog post on your website, ensuring each new visitor still gets something similar to what they came to your website to find—instead of a 404 page.

Read on to learn more about 301 redirects, when you’d use them, and how they can impact your website’s SEO.

What is a 301 Redirect?

A 301 redirect is an HTTP status code that indicates the permanent move of a page from one URL to another.

For example, if you create a 301 redirect for yourwebsite.com/old-page to yourwebsite.com/new-page, anytime someone types in or clicks on a link to yourwebsite.com/old-page, they’ll be automatically redirected to yourwebsite.com/new-page.

This ensures that you don’t lose any traffic or ruin a website visitor’s experience the second they land on your site.

But more than that, a 301 redirect also passes all page authority onto the new page, giving it an SEO boost right off the bat.

When to Use a 301 Redirect

Not sure when a 301 redirect would be necessary? Let’s walk you through a few different use cases on why this type of redirect can be a huge help.

Migrating Your Website

There are many reasons you might need to migrate your website or change your overall domain. Some of those include:

• Changing your business/domain name: If you’re going through a rebrand and changing your business name, you’ll want your website domain to reflect that, so you’d redirect traffic from oldbusiness.com to newbusiness.com.
• Purchasing an additional top-level domain: You may have initially bought a more unique TLD, like yourwebsite.co or yourwebsite.io, but noticed you were losing traffic to people automatically typing in yourwebsite.com. So you decide to buy yourwebsite.com, but now you need to make sure it properly redirects to your main website.
• Switching a subdomain: Though not the only instance when a subdomain is used, many companies create their blog on a subdomain (like blog.website.com or website.com/blog). They may decide down the road that they want to move from blog.website.com to website.com/blog or vice versa. This can be done with a 301 redirect.
• Making www./non-www. and http/https interchangeable: Whether someone types in www. before your URL or not, you want to make sure they make it to your website. The same goes if a URL starts with http (a non-secure URL) or https (a URL secured with an SSL certificate). Decide how you want your URL to be displayed in a website browser, whether it’s the full https://www.yourwebsite.com or simply yourwebsite.com. Then redirect all other options to your URL of choice so you don’t lose any website visitors.

Let’s look at that last one in action. Someone might type www.neilpatel.com into their browser to get to this site, like we see below:

But once they hit Enter/Return on their keyboard, they’re automatically redirected to just neilpatel.com:

The same would happen regardless of if they type in https://www.neilpatel.com, http://www.neilpatel.com, http://neilpatel.com, or any other variation. They’re all 301 redirected to neilpatel.com.

Changing a URL Slug

Maybe you need to redirect a single page, like a blog post or landing page. Instances when this might occur include:

• Fixing a spelling error made when the page was first published
• Optimizing a URL for SEO
• Recreating a piece of content with a slightly different URL slug
• Redirecting a page you no longer need to a similar page that still exists

Let me show you an example we did on this site recently. I’d published a post years ago sharing key content marketing statistics with the URL https://neilpatel.com/blog/38-content-marketing-stats-that-every-marketer-needs-to-know/.

However, the URL didn’t need to be that long. That’s not an optimized URL.

So, we recently updated the post and changed the URL to something much more compelling for SEO: https://neilpatel.com/blog/content-marketing-statistics/. 

We implemented a 301 redirect so that all page authority from the initial post is passed along to the new one and so no links that already exist lead visitors to a dead page.

Consolidating Multiple Pages

Strategies change, and multiple landing pages or blog posts that you may have thought were necessary in the past may not be the best course of action anymore. Instead of a handful of short blog posts or slightly related landing pages, you decide to create one piece of content that houses all key information.

Or, you might have some web pages that are simply too similar to each other. In instances like this, search engines may see this as what is called “cannibalization,” or two web pages from the same website competing for the same keyword. Search engines don’t like that, and it can penalize both pages—so it’s a good idea to combine them into one.

To ensure visitors to the other pages don’t get lost in the void, you’ll want to redirect any old pages to your new one.

Switching to a Different URL Path

A URL path includes elements to a link that come after the main domain. For example, yourstore.com/product-category/product-one is a URL path. If you switch product category names, you’ll need to redirect all links that used the old product category to the new one.

So you’d create a 301 redirect from yourstore.com/old-product-category/product-one to yourstore.com/new-product-category/product-one. 

How to Do a 301 Redirect

The process you have to use to create a 301 redirect depends on a couple of factors:

• The website builder/host you use
• Your level of website knowledge
• The number of 301 redirects you need to create

Some website builders, like Shopify or Squarespace, have built-in settings that make it easy for you to set up a redirect. Others, like WordPress or custom built websites, may be a bit more complicated and you’ll want to turn to your website developer for assistance.

But let’s cover a few top website builders and how you can create 301 redirects in each.

WordPress

If you have a WordPress website, your best bet is to use a plugin to help. While you can also log into your server and manually edit your .htaccess file to create a 301 redirect, a plugin is a much more user-friendly option for those without development experience.

Some redirect plugins available are:

• Your SEO plugin, like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO
• 301 Redirects
• Simple 301 Redirects

Upload and install the plugin, then follow its instructions to set up your page redirect(s).

Shopify

If you have an ecommerce website on Shopify, you might want to redirect product categories or pages if you make any changes to your offerings. Here are the steps to create this redirect:

• Log into your Shopify website. From your admin page, go to Content > Menus.
• Click View URL Redirects.
• Click Create URL redirect.
• Enter the old URL in the Redirect from box.
• Enter the new URL in the Redirect to box. To simply redirect to your home page, enter /.
• Click Save redirect.

Squarespace

To create a redirect for your Squarespace website, follow these steps:

• Log into your Squarespace website and head to your admin dashboard.
• Open the Developer tools panel.
• Click URL mappings.
• Click into the text box and input your redirect(s).
• Click Save.

With Squarespace, you need to follow developer formatting for your redirects, so this also may be something you hire or outsource for. But essentially, your URL mapping that you type in the text box should look something like this: /old-url -> /new-url 301.

Wix

Follow these steps to create a 301 redirect on your Wix site:

• Log into your Wix website and head to your SEO Dashboard.
• Click Go to URL Redirect Manager under Tools and settings.
• Click + New Redirect. 
• Select Single redirect.
• Type in your old page’s URL under Old URL.
• Under New URL, start typing the URL slug of your new page and choose it from the drop-down.
• Click Save, or click Save & Add Another to create more redirects.

Webflow

If you have a Webflow website, you can follow these steps to create your redirects:

• Log into your Webflow website, then go to Site settings > Publishing > 301 redirects‍.
• Input the old URL in the Old path text box.
• Input the new URL in the Redirect to path text box.
• Click Add redirect path.
• Publish your site to save your changes.

How 301 Redirects Impact SEO

Google uses what they call PageRank as part of their ranking signals indicating which pages should rank for which keywords. PageRank essentially measures web page importance based on things like backlinks (links from other websites) and domain authority.

In the past, 301 or 302 redirects would cause you to lose a little bit of PageRank. In fact, in 2013, Matt Cutts confirmed that 301 redirects caused around a 15% loss of PageRank.

However, Google changed this back in 2016 so that redirects would no longer lose PageRank. This means that 301 redirects completely pass all rankability to the new page. So if you’re redirecting a page that’s been on your website for years to a brand new URL, that new URL will automatically get a huge boost due to pre-existing PageRank.

But that’s not the only SEO impact that 301 redirects can produce.

If you delete a page from your website, but a link to that page still exists somewhere, anyone who clicks on that link will be taken to a dead page or a 404 error. This creates a bad user experience, something that can also impact your site’s SEO. 

Too many dead links can decrease your rankability. But creating 301 redirects when you remove a page helps ensure that people still find what they’re looking for when they click to your website.

Best Practices for 301 Redirects

If you’ve already started brainstorming some URLs that may need redirecting on your website as you’re reading, let’s first cover some best practices that can keep your redirected URLs from running into an infinite redirect loop or cause slow loading times.

These best practices can help keep the user experience running smoothly, even as they’re redirected from an old page to a new page.

Update Redirected Links

Let’s go back to the content marketing statistics article that we mentioned earlier. We redirected it from an old, longer URL to just neilpatel.com/blog/content-marketing-statistics/.

While we could just leave it as is, a best practice is for us to then go back to all existing links on our website that direct to the original URL and update them to reflect the new one. Sure, we’ve put a 301 redirect in place so we don’t technically have to. But the redirect can take extra loading time—loading time that we don’t have to impose on our visitors if we simply go back and update the redirected links ourselves.

If you’re redirecting an old landing page or blog post to a new one, you should also take the time to find links on your website that go to the old page and change them to reflect the redirect. This is a way to optimize the user experience on your website.

Remove Redirected Links From Your Sitemap

If you’ve created a 301 redirect to forward traffic from an old page or blog post to a new one, you’ll also want to make sure you let search engines know. They can certainly figure it out on their own, but it never hurts to give them a little help.

The way you can do this is by removing the old, now redirected page or post from your XML sitemap. A sitemap essentially lays out the structure of your website to make it easy for search engines to crawl each page and know what it’s about.

Again, how your sitemap works will depend on your website builder. Custom websites will need a custom sitemap page built. WordPress websites can work with a plugin. And other website builders have built-in settings that let you customize your sitemap.

Once you’ve created a 301 redirect to a new page, simply head over to your site builder’s sitemap tool and remove the old page. You can also add in the new page in its place so the search engine understands the new hierarchy.

Use 301 Redirects to Your Advantage

301 redirects can be a great strategy for optimizing your website for search. If you’ve recently conducted a website audit, you may have found some pages that simply aren’t performing the way you’d hoped. Or you may have found a couple of posts that are cannibalizing each other in search.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example.

You run a blog that shares graphic design tips. You’ve previously published a post about graphic design tips with the URL myblog.com/graphic-design-tips/. You’ve also published a post about graphic design mistakes with the URL myblog.com/graphic-design-fails/. 

The posts are so similar in nature that search engines are struggling to figure out which one to rank—deciding eventually to rank neither one.

To combat this, you might decide to add a section about graphic design mistakes to your post on graphic design tips, creating an all-encompassing guide. You can then delete the old post with the URL myblog.com/graphic-design-fails/ and redirect it to the graphic design tips post.

Then, the search engine only has one post to focus on, helping boost its ranking and increasing your organic traffic.

301 redirects don’t have to be a nuisance or something to avoid. They can be a very strategic part of your SEO plan, helping you rank for even more keywords and ensuring your website answers all the questions your target audience might have.

Takeaways

While 301 redirects are a basic technical website tool, they can also make a big impact on your website’s SEO. Strategically using 301 redirects helps ensure your website only houses the best content and that no traffic is getting lost in the fray.

Discover some more SEO basics to help give your site an even bigger boost in search rankings.