I wrote about the 301 Redirect for switching the use of www or not – the post you are reading now is discusses another use for the 301 redirect.
When MAJOR redirects are needed (as in a domain name change), think 301 Redirect. When changing individual pages, consider that you have another use for the 301 redirect.
Consider this… You have just edited some existing web pages of your web site; you read about keywords in your Post Titles and wanted to modify them so they become ranked higher on Goggle. Excellent decision! You are all ready to change the title from “Today’s Post on Redirects” to be something sexier like “Another use for the 301 Redirect” (deja vu!) Cool! I like this already!
Oh No! There is one huge problem! Even with the Less Than Stellar title, you may have had a good Google Ranking at: “http://yoursite.com/todays-post-on-redirects” (the original tile and page URL). When you change the name of your post, you are also changing the address of it. The updated page is now “http://yoursite.com/another-use-for-the-301-redirect”! What happens if someone searches Google now and see the old address and they click on it? They get the dreaded “Page Not Found” error! Not a good thing! Your old page (or pages if you change many of them) had high search engine rankings that you don’t want to forget about!
Is there a way that you can redirect web site traffic from your old pages to the new pages without losing your rankings? Absolutely! This can be accomplished by using a “301 redirect”. Even better yet… There is a WordPress Plugin that will take care of this for you! Install the plugin, Redirection
This plugin will get installed and is accessed under the Tool Area on the left side of your WordPress Dashboard. To add the redirection, enter the ‘old’ address under the Source URL and the webpage you want to end up at as the Target URL, like this:
(Click for a larger size)
To test this out, look at the non-existant page that automatically gets redirected at: This is the Old Page post – click on it and you will end up at the new page!
There you have it! If you rename your webpages or posts, you know know another use for the 301 redirect!
Paul–
You’ve solved a big dilemma for me!
I have a WordPress blog and wanted to take advantage of all the great SEO functionalities, but was afraid of making changes that would do this very thing. Now I have a workaround — and better yet, a plugin to help me do it!
Thanks for the tip.
Looking forward to more great posts from you!
Cathy
@Cathy – I noticed that you blog is using the post number as well as the title in your URL. There is a way to make one blanket change that will take care of all your posts (as opposed to redirecting each one). Give a yell if you are interested in knowing how to do that. Thanks.