What is the purpose of a 301 Redirect
301 redirects are like link bridges from Google or any other major search engines to your website. Let’s say you decide to simplify your URL structure or you decide to make your URL’s Search Engine friendly, these redirects are as necessary as food or water to us. A 301 redirect is a simple forwarding protocol what lets the search engine know that the URL has moved. Just as you would not want to miss any important mail, you would contact the post office to let them know you’ve moved.
Not having these redirects can be fatal to a website, from an indexation standpoint. Let’s say you were a small website with 500 URL’s and you had 385 indexed. If you were to completely restructure your url system, without 301 redirects. Overtime, Google and the other major search engines would stop displaying your URL’s as they would most likely return a 404 error.
Let’s use the example of a made up boat company xyzboatco.com. We decide to make our structure more effective with less folders and change xyzboatco.com/boats/engine/speed to xyzboatco.com/speed-boat-engines. If your initial URL was on the first page of Google and you didn’t redirect it to the later URL, overtime Google would drop that link. Google would still be sending traffic to the old link and it would result in a 404 error, which is an SEO no no.
If you are considering a URL overhaul it is absolutely imperative that you create a 301 redirect for your website, so you don’t lose all the hard work that you have put into your site.
