A 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine spider friendly strategy around for web sites.  A 301 redirect is not hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings, and Google PageRank for a particular website or page.  If you change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option.

Whenever you make changes to a web site, one of the most important considerations should be how to use 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirects to alert the search engine to your changes to avoid having a negative impact on your search rankings.  Whether you’re moving pages around or switching content management system platforms you will want to utilize.  As reviewed above, there are 2 main types of redirects which are 301 redirect or 302 redirect.

Programmers who are not search engine optimization experience may recommend using a 302 redirect which is temporary redirect.  Unfortunately a 302 redirect  does not transfer link popularity ranking from the old website to the new one.  That being said, the solution is to utilize a 301 redirect as defined earlier in this blog post.

One of the easiest ways for a 301 redirect to be implemented is in your .htaccess file; however, check with your programmer to determine if other implementation options are recommended.  When a visitor to your site (including a search engine robot or crawler) requests a web page, your web server checks for a .htaccess file.  The .htaccess file contains specific instructions, including redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

The 301 redirect code is interpreted as moved permanently. Conditional redirects should be avoided, especially if your risk tolerance for penalization is low. If you take a good hard look at your “need” for conditional redirects, I think you may find you don’t really need them at all.