New to SEO. How do I set up a 301 Redirect? What Else should I do?
-
Hello,
I am new to web design. I designed my own site using dreamweaver and did all my seo on my own, I read a few books. Long story short I rank on the bottom of page 1 just after 3 months and the keywords are highly competitive. Now, I am up against some heavy hitters from national brands versus my local real estate site.
I don't have a 301 redirect, and am not sure what else I should be doing to get my site ranked higher. I have back links from various sites, ( non-paid ) so it's what others call white hat.
When I grade my site on website grader I get a great score versus the sites that are higher than me. I'm guessing my sites age is an issue.
I guess I'm looking for some guidance.
Thank you all,
Here is my site to view.
-
I use Dreamhost, Amazon Cloud (AWS) and Rackspace. Nearly all the stuff you'll need can be done on Dreamhost. Dreamhost is a good web hosting company.
-
WHich hosting company do you prefer?
-
You will be limited to whatever Yahoo allows you to do. They aren't that flexible. Think about it this way. Have you ever heard of a large company use Yahoo? If you keep hanging around in these forums, you will outgrow Yahoo really quick.
-
Ok, I have yahoo as my host. I can't seem to find the htaccess. Any ideas?
-
Here, read this: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Print it and go to Starbucks.
Oh, one other thing. To make things faster in web development, I have a design made in PSD and then have it coded into WordPress. That way I don't have to mess with Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is fine, but not when I'm working on sites that I expect to grow. With WordPress (and many CMS'), it automatically 301s old pages. If not, then there's a plugin.
-
Thanks, I'll research it. I use Yahoo as my host company, so I'm sure they have htaccess.
-
Without knowing your setup its hard to say whats best to do since there is many ways to do a 301. However an easy way is to use htaccess ( if your server support this ) but most of them does.
More info how to do a 301 with htaccess can be found here
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hacked website - Dealing with 301 redirects and a large .htaccess file
One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking. How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
Redirect Plugin: Redirecting or Rewriting?
Hey everybody! It's been a while since off the boards! I am reworking a site and I have been looking into their Redirection Plugin. I personally tend to lean towards just using the .htaccess because, well, why not. However, when looking deeper into the plugin I found myself a little confused with their redirection wording. RewriteRule ^/products/landing-page-october-2015/$ /products/special-education-news-october-2015/ [R=301,L] Is that the same thing as a classic Redirect 301?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?
We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month. It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth. We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses). Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address. Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s2bkevin0 -
Url rewrite & 301 redirects
Hi all I am having some issues rearding url rewrites and 301 redirects with 1 and 1 hosting and am unsure of the best approach. The website is a custom made shopping cart system with categories and products. The current urls for categories are : index.php?l=product_list&c=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands The current urls for products are : index.php?l=product_detail&c=1&p=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands/banner-stand Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vividwebdesign0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
Is 301 redirect suggested on pagination pages
Hi - Due to pagination the default page of site is coming in 2 url with - ?page=1/ sub-url and /sub-url is 301 a recommended solution due to this pagination urls Also - is it required to create separate title and meta description of every pagination page We are taking specifically in context of our discounts and offer section http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_offers&view=list&Itemid=9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
What's new with SEO in last 6 months?
Hi, I've been away from the SEO scene for about 6 months now. I was wondering if anyone could summerise what the big changes are and how one needs to approach an SEO strategy now compared to last year before this Penguine (?) update.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LoveChicken0 -
2-stage 301 redirects
Dear colleagues, I have quite an unusual situation with one of my client's websites, and I could use an advise from someone who experienced the same circumstances: They are currently planning on launching a new site under the same domain (by September), when several key current pages are intended to be replaced with new equivalent pages under new URLs. So far it's pretty simple, BUT - due to a merger with another company they will be migrating their entire website to a different domain within a year. My question is - what would be the optimal solution for redirects? We are considering a 301 from the current pages to the new pages under the same domain, and once the new domain is activated - aside from defining 301 redirects from the new pages under the same domain to the new domain, we will cancel the original 301 from the old pages to the new pages on the same domain, and instead define new 301 for those pages to the new domain. What do you think? Is there a better solution - like using 302 redirects for the first stage? Has anyone tried such a procedure? Your input will be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Omer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Usearch0