Redirecting your aproach

Posted on: December 13th 2010 | Filed under: Interactive | Comment on this post

There seems to be no end to the little details when you launch a new web site - one of the most important is redirecting old URLs to the new. A well designed web site will always treat bad requests with some kind of branded response- "Sorry, we couldn't find the page you requested..." Critical to a 404 (page not found) response is keeping the visitor engaged- utilizing the search to look for similar terms to the page requested, providing a search form or even a humorous response- but what about pages that used to exist?

A 301 redirect is the most efficient and SEO friendly method of dealing with redirection. Technically speaking it is an HTTP response code indicating that the page has moved, permanently. Launching the new Strom Products website was an excellent opportunity to put 301 redirects to use. 

We moved Strom Product's website (www.stromproducts.com) from a relatively small, static presence to hundreds of pages of managed content- a much larger and more useful presence online. But while we were keen to attract new traffic, we didn't want to confuse or alienate existing visitors. Of course, we put the proper 404 details in place. Rather than simply telling return visitors their content "could not be found" we implemented a series of 301 redirects, sending old URLs to relevant new URLs.

Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.stromproducts.com/
Redirect 301 /offers.html http://www.stromproducts.com/great-offers/

The above example shows two of the 30 odd redirect rules we put in place when we launched the new website, automatically redirecting visitors looking for the homepage or the offers page to the new content. By taking this approach we could ensure that visitors who may have bookmarked a specific page on the Strom Products website wouldn't be forced to search for the same content on the new (and unfamiliar) website. Additionally, any cached search results would still be valid and as the spiders crawled the site the new content would automatically find its way to replace the old.