SEO experts and online marketers commonly use 301 redirects to improve the user experiences, and also retain the SEO rankings of old and irrelevant pages. A 301 redirect status code allows transferring visitors to another active URL when the requested one has been removed.
It points to a similar or most relevant page in place of the original one not needed anymore. In this way, user experience does not get affected as well as link equity of the old URL gets correctly directed and does not get lost. The SEO values also get transferred to the new pages that you define while creating redirects!
For example, while inspecting the URLs on your WordPress website you come across one reading https://www.petslover.com/old4567.html. Now, you will wish to clean it up. You will need to apply 301 WordPress redirect to transfer the visitors from this old page to a fresh destination – https://www.petslover.com/new.
In this way, you will stop users landing on the old page and the link equity of this URL gets passed on to the new one. Besides, visit and update backlinks on other sites to ensure they directly point towards the new URL. All this guarantees that all the link juice gets transferred.
How 301 redirects help SEO?
301 redirects is a HyperText Transfer Protocol [HTTP] response status code, which basically indicates that the URL is moved permanently. It is a response from the server-side, where the URL is hosted to browser-side that requested the page. The 301s are not inherently bad it just responds that the requested page is readdressed to another, which the browser will serve.
The fact is that you are performing a great task maintaining tidy website architecture by stopping users from landing on old or broken or irrelevant pages. Besides, improving user experience the 301 redirects also indicates the search engine the status of the requested URL.
The search engine gets to know what has happened to that page, so any links highlighting this old URL need to be transferred to a new destination provided. It also hints that the new page will replace the original one in search engine indexing.
If 301 redirects get ignored, the search engine will serve 404 error code, which means ‘Page Not found’. Over time, this can cause the page getting dropped from the search engine index and ultimately vanish. If the page has solid link value, then this also gets lost.
How to configure 301 redirects?
As you have seen how important 301s are, it is necessary to learn how to use them for your website. It can be implemented on the server modifying the .htaccess file housed on your site’s root directory. Actually, this can be a complex task for non-technical people.
Fortunately, for your WordPress website, you can use specially designed plugins. It removes the coding element while creating 301 redirects. For example, WP 301 redirects allow you to input the old page, and then the fresh URL and click, you created a 301 redirect. The process is made simple and quick, just eliminating the need for involvement of some professionals.
Besides, the WP 301 redirect plugin helps to identify the 404s and broken links, and import/export bulk redirects. Thus the significance of plugin to create 301 redirects cannot be ignored! If you want to overhaul you site completely, you can do so easily by using a reset plugin. You can find it by visiting https://wpreset.com/
