redirects vs URL reqwriting

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by magoo, Jul 17, 2009.

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  1. #1
    Technical question here for any of the more experienced SEO's on here. In the event of upgrading a website and changing url's which is the best way to deal with pages which currently have good serp results. Is it better to rewrite the new URL's to match the old ones, or is a 301 redirect adequate to avoid losing the results?
     
    magoo, Jul 17, 2009 IP
  2. tommseo

    tommseo Peon

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    #2
    in my view rewriting the urls would be better and more effective than 301 redirects.
     
    tommseo, Jul 17, 2009 IP
  3. bobchrist

    bobchrist Active Member

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    #3
    I think this post will give you more insight.
     
    bobchrist, Jul 17, 2009 IP
  4. stephen082

    stephen082 Active Member

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    #4
    301 is best approach in this scenario. 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. By 301 redirection, your SERP rankings remain stable and you get value for your all backlinks that are pointing to previous URL.
     
    stephen082, Jul 17, 2009 IP
  5. raghufme

    raghufme Peon

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    #5
    I think 301 is the best option. Because you want to replace old url with a new one and that new url will for sure needs much time to get in top. If you use 301 redirect all the weightage of you old url will be transfered to your new url and it will boost the new url, this will help the site in getting into top again.
     
    raghufme, Jul 17, 2009 IP
  6. magoo

    magoo Peon

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    #6
    Yes that's very helpful. My understanding so far is that 301 redirects will transfer the serp results but there might be a drop off, like 10% or so, although this should recover in time. rewriting the URL's will avoid the temporary drop off as the URL's will effecively be the same so there will be no transfer of results and the results do not need to be updated. There is slightly more work involved in doing it this way. I'd welcome any further opinions on the issue or anyone else's experience, thanks
     
    magoo, Jul 17, 2009 IP
  7. Canonical

    Canonical Well-Known Member

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    #7
    I agree that 301 is the way to go if you are indeed moving the page permanently. However, there is no more work in doing 301s than doing URL rewriting if your site is hosted on Apache. You'll likely use Mod Rewrite / .htaccess files to achieve this...

    To redirect requests for an old URL www.example.com/oldpage.html to a new URL www.example.com/newpage.html you might put the following in the .htaccess file in the root of your web:

    To URL rewrite requests for the old to the new you simply drop the R=301 flag resulting in:

    NOTE: Once the 301 redirects are in place they will need to stay there indefinitely (as long as you want the new URL to get credit for inbound links to the old URL). Also, if you have a significant number of links and are ranking well for specific terms, expect to see a dip in traffic for several weeks to even a month or two. You have to wait on the search engines to recrawl every inbound link to your site, discover the 301 redirect for that inbound link, and transfer credit for that inbound link before your rankings will return. Depending on how often the sites that link to you are crawled, that might take days, weeks, or even more than a month.
     
    Canonical, Jul 17, 2009 IP