As your website continues to develop and grow, there will be times that you may want to reorganize the pages of your website design. When you expand or change your online business, it makes good sense to implement these reorganizations so that you can better manage your data and so that site visitors can easily and logically follow the content on your web pages.

However, as you have built your website, the search engine spiders have been crawling and indexing your website and they expect to find pages where they were last posted. Also, other web pages may have been linked to those pages, and if you move them, their links will no longer point to valid page locations and eventually, you will begin to lose search engine ranking.

Fortunately, creating a 301 redirect is a solution to the problem that will make both the search engine spiders happy as well as maintain your inbound link integrity. You will need access to the .htaccess file in your website’s root directory. If you do not have access, ask your website administrator for assistance.

To redirect the page, add the following code:

redirect 301 /original_folder_location/original_page_name.htm http://www.your-domain.com/new_folder_location/new_page_name.htm

It is critical that you use the relative path for the original location (remove the “http”//www.your-domain.com) and leave a space between the original and new location. For the new location, you need to give the full URL, including the “http://www”.

This solution assumes that your server utilizes Apache. If not, consult your web administrator to find out what your options are for redirecting pages.

Marc Eskew is widely recognized for his work in Web Design, CSS, and SEO/SEM. Visit http://www.fmxservices.com for more information.

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Posted on November 21st, 2008 by 1prank
Filed under: Uncategorized