301 Redirect: A Website Change of Address
By Linda Sevier
We moved our office in April. It was not a good experience! Our phone and internet service was down for 8 days because a provider sold us a product that wasn't available in our area. We had to start over with another company. A real nightmare for an Inbound Marketing company. We were able to post a note on our website so folks would understand why the phone went unanswered. We also filed a change of address with the USPS so we would get our mail. Did you know that there is a change of address for your website if you change your domain or page URL? This can be risky if you've built links and worked to get your pages ranked.
A website URL change of address is called a 301 redirect. A 301 notifies the search engines that the website page has "permanently moved". It is the only type of redirect that is search engine friendly. It maps the old URL to a new URL. A 301 can be done at the site level if you've changed your domain or at the page level if you have restructured your pages. If you don't use a 301, the search engines and potential visitors may get a "page not found" message instead of your web page when they try to visit.
Another use for a 301 redirect is to let the search engines know that http://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com are the same website. To the search engines they are unique addresses and therefore different sites. This will cause your analytic data to be inaccurate. There is a simple way to check to see if you have one in place. Enter http://yourdomain.com in a browser. If you have a redirect in place you should see the address change to http://www.yourdomain.com as your page is displayed. There are resources on the internet that will help you check your 301 or create one if you don't. Simply Google 301 redirect or contact your website host if you are not able to create one yourself.
HubSpot User Tip: If you are a HubSpot user and your site is on HubSpot's CMS, your 301 redirects are created automatically. Each time you change the name of a page, the CMS creates a record. To see these records, go to the settings area of your portal and click on URL Mapping. DO NOT CHANGE these records unless you understand the ramifications of doing so.