SEO: How To Properly Redirect Your Old Domain Name To Your New Domain Name
Did your company change names and thus you have a new domain name? Or, did your company register multiple domain names so that you could protect your brand? Hopefully, you set up a proper SEO friendly redirect on the domain names that you’re currently not using. Wait a minute; you’re not sure are you? Regency Interactive can fix that for you.
Why is it important you ask? It’s extremely important because when Googlebot or any other search engine robot visits your website to crawl it, that it be able to follow any redirects that you may have set up on your domain name. If a search engine is not able to follow your existing redirect then the robot will automatically assume that the existing website has no content on it and thus does not need to be indexed by the robot. And, if your domain name may have had existing organic rankings, there’s a good chance that those organic rankings may suffer and eventually fall off the top pages of that particular search engine. Thus, it’s important to have your website use a proper redirect on it.
Is there more than one way to do a redirect? The answer is yes! The question then becomes, how best to implement a SEO friendly redirect on your domain name (s). There are a variety of ways to redirect a domain name; although most of these redirects will often do more harm than good for your domain name(s). What you want to do is have all of your old / alternate domain names to “301 redirect” to your new / main domain name.
What’s a 301 redirect? A 301 redirect tells a search engine spider that the domain they are trying to access has permanently moved to a new location, which of course is your new / main domain name. How this works, is that when both your visitors and search engine spiders visit your domain name, they will be automatically redirected to the new / main domain name from your old / alternate domain name. Another redirect that most people are familiar with is what’s called a 302 redirect, which is a temporary redirect that basically says Domain B has temporarily moved to Domain A, but that they may move back to Domain B and start serving content there. It’s been noted that Google prefers for you to do a 301 redirect instead of a 302 redirect as it is more search engine friendly.
To learn how to do a proper redirect on various servers, feel free to consult this page.
