Use 301 Redirects as More than a "Forwarding Address"

Whenever you move a webpage to a different URL, leave a "forwarding address" by using a "301 Redirect." Don't let your programmer simply use a "meta refresh," which doesn't convey the same search engine optimization benefit and can be considered spammy.

When an end-user looks for the moved page at its old location, a 301 redirect will automatically send the end-user to the new location. But equally important, when search engines discover the 301 redirect, they will update the webpage's address in their indexes without any loss in PageRank. For instance, if 30 external websites linked to your webpage at its old address, a 301 redirect will cause search engines to give you the same ranking credit as if those 30 external websites linked to the moved webpage at its new address. That's good, because you won't have to start your link-building from scratch.

Create a 301 redirect by accessing the .htaccess file in your root directory. At the bottom of the file, add the phrase "redirect 301," followed by a space. Then, add the webpage's old folder path and file name, followed by a space. Finally, add the webpage's new absolute URL. The code should look like this:

redirect 301 /oldpath/oldname.html http://yourdomain.org/newpath/newname.html

If your website is hosted on a shared server that does not allow you to create or modify an .htaccess file, change web hosting plans.