Google needs content. Without it, there are no search results, and no multi-billion dollar contextual ads feeding the bottom line (which they will talk about today after the market closes.)

Sometimes a site publisher picks up a new domain and needs to make sure visitors, and search engines, don’t get lost with the move. The Google Webmaster Central blog discussed that topic, starting with the essential 301 redirect.

Using 301 redirects serve as a way to get people and crawlers to the new domain. It also serves a higher purpose: helping webmasters avoid potential duplicate content penalties to their rankings within search results.

It’s a work-intensive process, but can be automated as shown on Wikipedia.

Google included in its suggestions the idea that a change for rebranding or redesign purposes might be accomplished best in two phases: site move first, redesign second.

"This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior," Google’s Ríona MacNamara said.

"The big shocker is that MSN is so bad at following 301 redirects that they now send the site 0 traffic. The old site is listed URL only, while the new site is not listed," he writes.

The conclusions of Wall’s case study:

1.    Move in the off-season
2.    Increase ad spend
3.    Block indexing of low-information pages
4.    Bring profitable pages forward, emphasizing them with position and internal link structure.
5.    Move it page by page for speed testing.
6.    Issue press releases, submit to directories, build links.

Wall goes into way more detail at his site, complete with stats.

Additionally, I knew that I wanted to use a 301 Redirect, since that is commonly held to be more Search Engine Friendly than a 302 Redirect. For those wondering why, a 301 redirect indicates to the visitor or bot that the page has moved permanently to it’s new location, as opposed to a 302 redirect, which indicates that the move is only temporary.

Now, I had never set up a redirect before, so the first thing I did was to Google it. I found a bunch of sites teaching about how to do redirects, but they all made either one or both of the following assumptions:

• I had access to the server httpd.conf
• I only wanted to redirect a single page

I am on shared hosting, thus do not have access to Apache’s httpd.conf. Instead I knew that I had to perform the move in my sites .htaccess file.

Since I wanted to move an entire site rather than a single page, using the instructons given for rewriting a single URL to point to a new location would have become extremely tedious given that I had nearly 500 active URLs at the new location.

Eventually, frustrated by the lack of instruction on the web, I finally turned to #apache on irc.freenode.net, where some helpful people got me finally set up.

How to 301 Redirect an Entire Site in .htacess

If you wish to have all the URL’s in an existing site redirect to your new site, include the following code in the .htaccess file in the root of the old site.

Redirect 301

So, in my case, I added the following line to the .htaccess file in the root of infohatter.com

Redirect 301 /blog http://www.caydel.com

Now, any URL which points to my old blog location is now forwarded to it’s corresponding URL in the new blog. For example, http://www.infohatter.com/blog/monetize-your-blog-3-selecting-your-advertising-strategy/ now redirects all the visitors to http://www.caydel.com/monetize-your-blog-3-selecting-your-advertising-strategy/

301 Redirect for a Single URL in .htaccess

If you have a specific set of pages you would like to move, while leaving the others intact, you can use the following 301 redirect in your .htaccces. Notice that the syntax is the same as we used above to send a whole subdirectory to a new url. This form will also keep any arguments passed along with the URL as a GET or POST request, so that they are available to the redirected page.

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

301 Redirect to your www

I feel somewhat obligated to include this, since this is perhaps the most important redirect in existence, and EVERY SITE SHOULD USE IT.

Many webmasters do not realize that they likely have their entire site duplicated. Google considers www.example.com to be a different site than example.com. The www’ is considered tp be a seperate subdomain,

This presents a problem because if you have links pointing to both versions, Google will split the attributed trust from these links between the two copies of your site. This will result in lower search engine rankings, and lower search traffic to your site. Now this can be eliminated by implementing this simple 301 redirect in your .htaccess.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Good Luck – remember that you always want to use a 301 redirect instead of a 302. Always make sure you 301 redirect your non-www’ version of your website to the www’ version for the best Google results.

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