What is Redirection and How Does it Affect SEO?

For those who are non-technical, a 301 and 302 redirects may sound meaningless and strange. But for those in the business of outsource online marketing, these redirects are nothing new. By definition, “redirect” means to direct someone or something to a different place or a different route. In simpler terms, a webpage redirection means assigning a new URL to the webpage. Redirection can also mean a changed design, coding, navigation, etc.

Redirection may be prompted in any businesses’ web pages, for instance, for different reasons and the changes applied will depend on such reason. The usual reasons for redirecting a web page are:

• Broken URL or URL that is not working
• An inactive webpage or website
• A new webpage is being tested for design and functionality
• A web page is being fixed and while in that process, you want your users to make a detour to another page so as not to disrupt the user’s website experience

To be more specific, a 301 redirect, also known as a permanent redirect, is used to permanently redirect a page. This means that all ‘qualities’ of the redirected page will be passed on to the new or detour page, including PageRank, MozRank, Page Authority and Traffic Value. A 301 redirect is a complete takeover of the old site or page where the changes implemented are meant to be permanent. The old page will then be removed from Google’s index and the new one will take over and replace the old page. Majority of the internet marketing companies employ page redirects as an effort to continuously update their contents.  

On the other hand, a 302 redirect which is also known as a temporary redirect, is used to redirect your site visitors into a new webpage with the intention of bringing the redirected or old page back after a specified time or after some changes on the old page have already been completed. With this objective, a 302 redirect will maintain the ‘qualities’ of the old page and not pass on to the detour page. Because the old redirected page will be brought back to the fore, the new or detour page need not absorb the ‘qualities” of the redirected page. Any internet marketing company should be careful in using a 302 redirect correctly. Otherwise it will hurt the site’s search engine visibility.   

Effects of Redirects to SEO

Using page redirects can have negative impact mainly on search engine optimization rankings. Using a 301 redirect can slightly lower a web page’s PageRank points. Google, a popular and widely used search engine hinted that a 301 redirect may not always transfer PageRank data from one page to another. And since PageRank affects the number of pages crawled by Google on a given website, a reduce PageRank will impact the site’s visibility to users.

In order to minimize the negative effect of redirects to SEO on your website, it is important that internet marketing companies make sure that all links to their old page from directories or other websites are equally updated. This will probably be the most difficult part of implementing changes on the website because many links may end up on pages which no longer exist or have been abandoned or neglected. By ensuring that all the relevant pages are updated with the redirection changes, improved contents, and good site architecture, the site’s search engine ranking may not be hurt at all.

Why do you redirect a web page?

You redirect a web page because you do not want to commit the mistake of having search engines index the page that no longer exists or the page that is under construction. Broken links are your worst enemies in pulling your ranking down. One wrong move could be very detrimental to a website. You do not only appear as scam to robots but to humans as well. You will lose your credibility and the chance of getting visited by the same user is synonymous to impossible.

A good SEO company is cautious in committing redirection mistakes because the harm it may cause a business may not be controlled and could be fatal.