Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What is the difference between 301 redirects and backlinks?
-
i have seen some 301 redirects on my site billsonline, can anyone please explain the difference between backlinks and 301 redirects, i have read some articles where the writer was stating that 301 are not good for website.
-
301 redirects and backlinks serve different purposes in the realm of website management and SEO.
A 301 redirect is a method used to permanently redirect one URL to another. It's commonly used when a page has been moved or removed, ensuring that visitors and search engines are automatically directed to the new URL. Essentially, it's a way to preserve a page's ranking and traffic when its URL changes.
On the other hand, backlinks are incoming links from one webpage to another. They are crucial for SEO as they signal to search engines that other websites find your content valuable enough to link to. Backlinks are like votes of confidence for your website, and quality backlinks from reputable sites can significantly improve your site's search engine rankings.
-
@jackwill1234 said in What is the difference between 301 redirects and backlinks?:
Could someone explain the difference between backlinks and 301 redirects for my website, www-homeworkify.live ? I've come across articles suggesting that 301 redirects might not be advantageous for websites, and I'd like to understand more.
Sure! Backlinks are links from other websites to yours, helping to boost your site's authority and visibility in search engine rankings. 301 redirects, on the other hand, permanently direct users and search engines from one URL to another. While backlinks improve your site's reputation, 301 redirects are useful for preserving SEO value when you've changed a URL or merged two websites. Both are valuable tools, but they serve different purposes in optimizing your website's performance.
-
Could someone explain the difference between backlinks and 301 redirects for my website, www-homeworkify.live ? I've come across articles suggesting that 301 redirects might not be advantageous for websites, and I'd like to understand more.
-
301 Redirects:
A 301 redirect is a method used to permanently redirect one URL to another. It's an HTTP status code that indicates that a webpage has been permanently moved to a new location. When a user or a search engine bot tries to access the original URL, they are automatically redirected to the new URL specified in the 301 redirect.
301 redirects are commonly used when a website undergoes a redesign, changes its domain name, or moves content to a new location. They help preserve SEO value by transferring the ranking signals from the old URL to the new one.
Backlinks:Backlinks, also known as inbound links or incoming links, are hyperlinks on other websites that point back to your website. They are a crucial component of search engine optimization (SEO) and are considered a vote of confidence from one site to another.
Backlinks are valuable because search engines like Google use them as one of the factors to determine the authority, relevance, and credibility of a website. Websites with a higher number of quality backlinks tend to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Backlinks can be obtained through various methods such as creating high-quality content, outreach campaigns, guest blogging, and participating in online communities. -
A 301 redirect is a method used to permanently redirect one URL to another, often utilized during website migrations or when a page is no longer active. Backlinks, on the other hand, are incoming links from other websites to a specific webpage, which can influence a site's search engine ranking and authority. While both serve to redirect traffic, they operate in distinct ways: 301 redirects manage URL redirection, while backlinks contribute to a site's off-page SEO efforts by enhancing its credibility and visibility.
-
301 redirects and backlinks serve different purposes in website management. A 301 redirect is a server-side instruction that permanently redirects users and search engines from one URL to another, preserving SEO value and ensuring seamless navigation. Backlinks, on the other hand, are inbound links from other websites to your website that influence search engine rankings and demonstrate trustworthiness and authority in your niche. 301 redirects manage URL changes and website rebuilds, while backlinks contribute to off-page SEO and domain authority.
-
I've noticed some 301 redirects on my website, LiteblueInsights. Can someone please clarify the distinction between backlinks and 301 redirects? I've read articles suggesting that 301 redirects aren't beneficial for websites.
-
A 301 redirect is the header response sent when a page does not exist or not required and the redirected page is loaded instead. Typically a 301 redirect is created when a page is taken down. A 301 redirect is not bad for a site. Redirect chains can be bad - so 301 to 301 to 301 etc.
What you want to look at is if you have 301s in your menus, homepage or main content linking to main pages. These links should be either removed or updated to the new URL. There should be no 301s here, it's good housekeeping.
A backlink is an link from an external site linking to a page on your site.
-
I believe the below reply that is explained by Mr Victor, is absolutely correct.
-
The redirects are intended to keep link juice when migrating to a new domain. Actually they just help the existing users find the new domain. If there are redirects to your domain from unrelated websites the Google bot should be smart enough to ignore them. That's why it's better to have backlinks from unrelated sources than redirects.
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
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
301 redirect adding trailing slash to url
I am looking into a .htacess file for a site I look after and have noticed that the urls are all 301 redirecting from a none slash directory to a trailing slashed directory/folders. e.g. www.domain.com/folder gets 301 redirected to www.domain.com/folder/ Will this do much harm and reduce the effect on the page and any links pointing to the site be lessened? Secondly I am not sure what part of my htaccess is causing the redirect. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
Technical SEO | | TimHolmes
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R,NE] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L] or could a wordpress ifmodule be causing the problem? Any info would be apreciated.0 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
Creating a CSV file for uploading 301 redirect URL map
Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Simple 301 redirect a subfolder to another subfolder
Hi, I have a number of sub-folders that I have to move, each of which contains a number of files. subfolder A has files a, b & c subfolder B has files d, e & f
Technical SEO | | aactive
subfolder C has files g, h & i A, B & C folders need to be X, Y & Z Will the following work? RewriteRule ^subfolder-A/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-X/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-B/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-C/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Z/ [R=301,L] will this result in visitors to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-B/f.html being redirected to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/f.html? All on the same domain. in reality we are talking hundreds of sub folders and thousands of files so we don't want to have to reference every file individually in the htaccess. Thanks0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
301 redirects & merging two sites into one
We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | Gmorgan0 -
Do search engines treat 307 redirects differently from 302 redirects?
We will need to send our users to an alternate version of our homepage for a few hours for a certain event. The SEO task at hand is to minimize the chance of the special homepage getting crawled and cached in the search engines in place of our normal homepage. (This has happened in the past so the concern is not imaginary.) Among other options, 302 and 307 redirects are being discussed. IE, redirecting www.domain.com to www.domain.com/specialpage. Having used 302s and 301s in the past, I am well aware of how search engines treat them. A 302 effectively says "Hey, Google! Please get rid of the old content on www.domain.com and replace it with the content on /specialpage!" Which is exactly what we don't want. My question is: do the search engines handle 307s any differently? I am hearing that the 307 does NOT result in the content of the second page being cached with the first URL. But I don't see that in the definition below (from w3.org). Then again, why differentiate it from the 302? 307 Temporary Redirect The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction0