Ask Jim: When to 301 Redirect
Myles Harris asked on Facebook:
When redesigning a site and optimising it for SEO, is changing over poor URL’s like ‘/depnum=812’ to ‘/about’ as simple as 301 redirecting?
The short answer Myles is yes. All you need to do to change over old poor URL’s like the one mentioned to a more descriptive and meaningful URL is a 301 redirect.
The 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that is used frequently when migrating sites. In addition to pointing users to the correct pages rather than encountering 404 errors, 301 redirects let Google know that content has moved. If your old page was ranking for a phrase and your new page is equally weighted for relevance and authority then it may rank similarly.
301 redirects are an important part of a site rebuild but shouldn’t be used to simply redirect all old pages to a new home page. People searching for your old content may end up on your new page, but you can bet they’ll bounce back to the results page before you can even say 301.
Thanks for the question Myles!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
