How to Do a 301 Redirect

March 2004

If you need to move a page or a whole website, a 301 redirect is always recommended. If you just change a file name or delete a page, you my lose search engine rankings that were associated with the old page. By using a 301 redirect, you tell search engines and humans where to find the new page.

Avoid using a meta refresh tag as this is a technique used by search engine spammers to rank well for certain keyphrases that are totally irrelevant from the page redirected to. Many search engines filter out the meta refresh tag, so it is not a search engine friendly option.

So, how do you do a 301 Redirect? It's actually quite simple on a website using a Unix server:

1. Locate or create a .htaccess file on your server. Your .htaccess file gives search engine robots instructions on security and redirects.

2. If you don't have an .htaccess file on your server, you can easily create one using a text file. Name it ".htaccess"

3. If there is already an .htaccess file scroll down past the code that is already there and begin your new redirect instructions.

4. Put in your redirect information, which should look like this:

redirect 301 /directory/file.html http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html

*Note: The first part "/directory/file.html" is the location of the file being moved and the second part  "http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html" is where the file is being moved.

5. Upload the file to your server.

Using a Windows Server?

Click here for instructions on creating a 301 Redirect on a Windows server.