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This article will show you how to use the 301 redirect to PERMANENTLY move anything from an entire website to another domain, or a single web page’s URL from on to another. You can move a URL from inside of the same site between directories or sub domains as well as between 2 completely different domain names. This is very handy for SEO and as Google has recently stated, it will also move Page Rank and placement if you use the redirect 301 command correctly.

APACHE Webserver: 301 Redirects

What’s a 301 Redirect?
The number 301 identifies a specific 3-digit server header code that is generated by a web server when a browser or search engine spider tries to download a web page. The 301 code says the page has been permanently moved to another location. Browsers and spiders then know to “redirect” themselves to any new address that you specify in your .htaccess file.

What’s a .htaccess File?

A .htaccess (pronounced “dot-H-T-access”) file is a simple text file that resides in the root directory of your web site where, typically, your home page also resides. The .htaccess file serves a variety of different functions and can live in other directories as well but, for the purpose of doing a 301 redirect, you should place a .htaccess file in your root directory. If one doesn’t already exist, you can create it using any plain-text editor (like NotePad, or TextPad), then name the file .htaccess (that’s right, no extension – just a period followed by htaccess).

If your site’s root domain already contains a .htaccess file, you can simply scroll to the end of whatever code is already there and append your 301 redirect code at the bottom of the file, starting on a new line. While this may sound complicated, it’s actually very, very simple to do. If you can upload files to and from your web server, then chances are you’ll have no trouble managing (i.e. altering or creating and uploading) your .htaccess file(s).

There are Four Primary Reasons to Use a 301 Redirect:

1. To change primary domain names an event that commonly occurs whenever a company changes names or switches to a more keyword-friendly domain.
2. To ensure that SE spiders only index either the www or non-www version of your site. Since each version is technically a different URL, to have both versions available for indexing dilutes PageRank, as it is being split between multiple sites.
3. To catch traffic from ancillary domain sources without presenting duplicate content to the engines and running the risk of being penalized.For instance, it’s good online strategy to protect your trademark or other proprietary product or service names by purchasing related, but different, top-level domain names. Examples would include .net or country-specific extensions (such as .co.uk), or even common misspellings. And, whenever such domains lend themselves to type-in traffic, you’d be well advised to activate them – but use the 301 redirect to seamlessly send that traffic from these ancillary domains to your primary domain.
4. To prevent any of your ancillary domains from being displayed in the search results in lieu of your primary domain.

Changing Your Domain Name

If ever you should need to change your domain name, proceed as follows:

1. First, don’t do it unless absolutely necessary. Chances are very good you will lose ranking, inbound links, and traffic at least temporarily. The steps outlined here can help you minimize, but not entirely eliminate, these negative repercussions.
2. If you are, however, convinced that you must change your domain name, be prepared to leave your old site up for at least three months and possibly longer depending on the length of time it takes for your site logs to show all traffic to the old site has stopped. Of course, you’ll also want to be certain that all major engines who had indexed your old site have spidered and re-indexed your new site.Your new site logs will show when you are no longer receiving referral traffic from the old site. Your old site logs will show when you are no longer receiving referral traffic from the search engines.
3. When making the switch, be sure to leave the content up on the old site. You’ll want to copy the old site to its new location, as opposed to just moving the site to a new location. The difference is that when you copy a site, you leave the original in its old location. If you take the old site’s content down and just replace it with a 301 redirect, the spiders may see the old pages as empty content and simply delete those pages from their index.While it’s true that you run a small risk of being snagged by the duplicate content filter, it’s a minor risk compared to the risk of having your site dropped entirely out of the listings. Besides, since both Google and Yahoo recommend the 301 as the preferred method for permanently redirecting to a new site, you’ve given yourself a defendable reason for the duplicate content to co-exist at least until your logs show that traffic to your old site has ceased.Also bear in mind that the duplicate content penalty is usually applied to only one of any two identical pages, so people should still be able to find your site perhaps just not under your preferred domain at first. Still, that’s much better than being dropped altogether if the 301 redirect doesn’t work due to a search engine glitch beyond your control.Critical point: If the content of your old site appears gone to the indexing spider, then you’re out of the listings no traffic equals no money and it’s cheap beer and hot dogs for you and your friends come Superbowl-party-time (ouch!).
4. Contact everyone who links to you and ask them (beg them, pay them?), to change their link to your new site. Monitor this process to make sure they follow through. Sure, this can be a headache if you have a lot of links but, if people don’t change them, all those links won’t do you much good and they’ll all be broken links when you finally take the old site down (a fact you might want to use as leverage while gently persuading the referral site owners to make the necessary link changes after all, they probably don’t want “broken links” on their site). Unfortunately, there isn’t an effective shortcut to getting other sites to update their links to you. That’s just one of the reasons why we say don’t change your domain name unless it’s absolutely necessary. The more incoming links you have, the more challenging it is to switch to a new domain name.
5. Once you’re sure you want to make the change, use a 301 redirect. On an Apache server (running UNIX) a 301 redirect is very easy to do. Just append the following statement on a separate line at the end of your .htaccess file:
   redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/
   By placing the above statement in the .htaccess file within your website’s root directory, you’ll be redirecting all traffic from the old site to whatever site you specify in http://www.newdomain.com/.

   Important to note: This simple one-line command only works if you are maintaining the same exact structure of the old site on the new site. Every page on the old domain will be redirected to its equivalent page on the new domain. However, if you have some pages on the old domain that are not going to be on the new domain, this single line command would redirect users and spiders to some non-existent pages… the ones you removed. Therefore, bear in mind that your site move will be easiest on you if you just copy the new site structure exactly the same as the old site.

   Of course, once you’ve established your site under the new domain name and have phased out the old domain name, you can then start rearranging the site structure. In other words, don’t try to change your domain name and restructure your site at the same time unless you’re either a professional or a masochist.

   If you only want to redirect portions of the old site to the new site, such as a single directory, you can place the following text within a single line in the .htaccess file:

   redirect 301 /directoryname/ http://www.newdomain.com/directoryname/

   This is useful if you want to test out the redirect on part of your site before redirecting the whole thing.

   You can also redirect individual pages:
   redirect 301 /directoryname/pagename.html http://www.newdomain.com/directoryname/pagename.htmlRemember: the command above needs to all be on a single line in order to work.

6. If you’re listed in directories such as DMOZ.org (aka, the Open Directory Project [ODP]), then changing your domain name presents an additional challenge. It’s not so much that changing domain names within DMOZ is a problem, it has more to do with the fact that many other directories, including the Google directory, get their directory listings from DMOZ. That means that, depending on how frequently they sync up their listings with DMOZ’s, it could be quite a while before those other directories list your new domain. As we’ve suggested, moving a domain can hurt your rankings and the lack of directory listings for the new domain (resulting in a temporary link popularity deficit) is one of the reasons why this is true.Regardless, to change your domain name in DMOZ, go to the category in which you are listed and click on ‘Update URL’ at the top right. You’ll be asked to enter both your old and new URLs. A DMOZ editor will then review your site and change your listing. Nearly all directories have an Update URL feature, so that’s where to look for a starting point in updating your domain information within the various directories.By the way, don’t attempt to list your new domain along with your old domain within a directory. They strongly object to duplicate listings and your new domain definitely won’t make it past the directory’s editors.
7. Once you’ve set up your redirect, use a server header checking tool (such as: Check Headers) to verify the server is correctly processing your redirect. You’ll want the site you’re redirecting from to return a 301 Moved Permanently header and the site you are redirecting to to return a 200 OK server header.Here’s a sample 301 redirect to give you an idea of what a server header checking tool will reveal when using a 301 to consolidate www and non-www URL’s, giving preference to the www version (notice the relevant portion of the response highlighted in yellow).Move a page using ColdFusion<cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
   <cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.domain.com/new-page.html”>

   Move a page using Java Server Pages (JSP)

   <%
   response.setStatus(301);
   response.setHeader(“Location”, “http://www.domain.com/new-page.html”);
   response.setHeader(“Connection”, “close”);
   %>
   If You’re On a Windows Server

   The examples below all are specific to Unix- or Linux-based web servers. It’s also possible to use redirects on a Windows-based web server. This is easiest if you use scripting in a .asp page (which is one good argument for using .asp for all the documents on your site, even if you don’t put scripting in them).

   Here’s an example of a .asp 301 redirect (save to yourfilename.asp):

   <%@ Language=VBScript %>
   <%
   Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”
   Response.addheader “Location”, “http://www.newdomain.com/newurl/”
   Response.End
   %>

   How to Change Domain Names on Windows Servers

   Since the code outlined above must be put on each page, you don’t have the ability to bulk redirect whole directories with this technique the way you do with Apache. However, if you have Admin access to your IIS server, you can easily redirect whole directories or even whole sites using the admin interface. That process is laid out step-by-step on the Microsoft website.

   1. In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect.
   2. Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
   3. Enter the page that the page will be redirected to
   4. Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”.
   5. Click on ‘Apply’.

   How to Fix the www vs. non-www Problem on Windows Servers

   The Microsoft tutorial above is also helpful when it comes to fixing the www vs non-www issue on Windows servers. It all has to be done through the admin interface.

   Essentially, it’s the same as changing a domain name except you’re redirecting from http://domain.com/ to http://www.domain.com/.

   The .NET tutorial site xoc.net has a good short tutorial.

   To perform the redirect, suppose that the content for www.xoc.net comes from c:inetpubwww-xoc-net: Open Internet Services Manager and create a web site for xoc.net. Make the content directory for the site be the same directory, c:inetpubwww-xoc-net, as www.xoc.net. Test getting content from http://xoc.net. This should work, but won’t redirect yet. Select the xoc.net web site in Internet Services manager and enter the properties. In the Home Directory tab, change the option button “When connecting to this resource the content should come from” to “A redirection to a URL”. Specify the URL as http://www.xoc.net. Check the checkbox that says “A permanent redirection for this resource.”

   Similarly, you can move a page using ASP.NET, but beware there’s currently a glitch in the way ASP.NET 2 handles redirects. That glitch should be fixed soon. To redirect a page using ASP.NET, set up the new page at its new location, then place the following code at the top of the old page:

   <script runat=”server”>
   private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
   {
   Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
   Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.domain.com/new-page.asp”);
   }
   </script>

   #1 Server Response: http://sampledomain.com/

   HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:09:18 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.29 Location: http://www.sampledomain.com/ Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Redirect Target: http://www.sampledomain.com/

   #2 Server Response: http://www.sampledomain.com/

   HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:09:23 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.29 X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.8 Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=be8ce4fee0c29c968c8382be1fdfa3bd; path=/ Expires: Thurs, 16 Dec 2004 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cache Connection: close Content-Type: text/html

   From the example above, we see that, when the spider initially requested the page, the server read the .htaccess file which told it to respond with a 301 Moved Permanently response code. After which the spider redirected itself to the new domain at http://www.sampledomain.com/. There the spider received a 200 OK response code, telling it that the page was successfully located. This is the combination of responses you’ll be looking for when you setup your own 301 redirection.

   Most web hosts pre-configure their servers to point both the www and non-www version of your URLs to the same page by default. This is good because someone forgetting to type the www will still be directed to your site rather than getting a 404 not found response code (one of those other 3-digit server codes).

   However, pre-configuring the server to default all pages to the www version can also be a liability. That’s because this allows people to link to your site with or without using www. The end result being that search engines may index some of your pages with the www, and some of your pages without. This effectively splits your site into two different sites in the eyes of the search engines and dilutes your incoming link popularity (think PageRank).

   Ideally, you’ll want all of your listings and links to use one or the other (we mildly prefer the www but consistency is really the only important factor).

   Worth noting is that both Google and Yahoo use a redirect to consolidate their traffic to the www version of their URL. For example, entering http://google.com/ will redirect you to http://www.google.com/.

   To ensure that search engines only index the www versions of your site’s pages, place the following code into a .htaccess file in your root directory
   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.your-site.com [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-site.com/$1 [L,R=301]
   </IfModule>
   Remember to replace www.your-site.com with the www version of your domain name.

   To make sure search engines only index the non-www versions of your pages, use the following:
   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^your-site.com [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your-site.com/$1 [L,R=301]
   </IfModule>
   Of course, replace your-site.com with the non-www version of your domain name.

   In case you’re wondering why the code used to merge your www and non-www pages is a bit more complicated than the code used to change your domain name, it’s because the www and non-www versions of your site both point to the same place on the server (they are considered aliases of each other). This means that anything you put in your .htaccess file applies to both types of pages. If you were to use the simpler redirect that we used to change domain names, the redirect would get stuck in an endless loop – redirecting back and forth between the two types of pages. Eventually your users would just see an error message telling them they had exceeded the number of redirects permitted.

   A 301 redirect can also solve a similar problem that occurs with URLs such as

   http://your-site.com/

   and http://your-site.com/index.html.
   Both of these addresses point to your homepage, but search engines still see them as two different pages, thereby splitting your page’s importance. You can add the following code to your
   .htaccess file to make sure search engines only index http://your-site.com/:

   RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]

And Microsoft can give you more info on how to redirect pages using their IIS Server. More about domain and page redirect utilizing IIS

Owning Multiple Domain Names

Another use for a 301 redirect involves protecting your trademark or other proprietary keyword-friendly or misspelled domains by purchasing and activating such applicable domain names