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If you're like me, you might be a bit confused about the term "301 crawl". What is it? How does it work? Is it even useful for SEO hosting clients? Does it have anything to do with spiders taking over your website and eating all your server space or something?? Well no, have no fear.
In this post I'm going to explain exactly what a 301 crawl is and why you should use one.
301 redirects are a mechanism to tell search engines and browsers that a web page has permanently moved to a new address. They tell search engines that the content on your website has moved, and that they should update their records accordingly. This means that when users search for something specific on Google or Bing, it will show up in their results page instead of an error page or 404 not found message. This can have a significant impact on how many people land on your site --- which is why we always recommend using them, when you restructure your website!
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. It tells Google and other search engines that the website has moved to a new location. There are two types of redirects, temporary and permanent. A temporary 302 redirect is used when you want to indicate that a page has been temporarily moved (e.g., for maintenance or site updates). A 301 redirect points to the new location of your page permanently, while a 302 points back to its original location temporarily until it's ready to go live again at its new home on another server or domain name, or even back on the same old address.
You should use a 301 redirect when:
A page has been moved to another location.
A page has been deleted from the site.
A page has been renamed, but you want to preserve the old URL's rankings by using it as an alternate version of the same content.
The answer is simple: using a 301 redirect can help you keep your site's search engine value and link juice while maintaining or even increasing your domain authority and ranking. This ensures that when someone searches for keywords relevant to your business, they'll end up on the right page of your site---and not some other site that has copied or stolen content from yours. Plus, if they see something they like, they'll likely click through to read more content on your site as well as share it with friends!
301 redirects are a good way to ensure that your website's search engine rankings are not affected.
If you have moved to a new domain, it is important that the old domain 301 redirects all of its traffic to the new domain. Otherwise, your website's search engine rankings will be negatively affected because Google and other search engines will no longer recognize all of the links coming in from those old URLs. This can slow down or even stop ranking growth on your new site due to reduced link velocity (the rate at which fresh links appear organically).
When you request a website, the server sends back an HTTP header line. The HTTP header is sent before any of the actual web page content, and it tells your browser how to open all of the files in relation to one another.
For example:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved PermanentlyLocation: https://yourwebsiteurlhere.com/page-name-here
The difference is as simple a 301 redirect is permanent, whereas a 302 redirect is temporary.
When you're changing URLs or making significant alterations to your site, this can cause problems for search engines (and for users) if the old page still exists in some form on the internet. It could show up in search results and confuse users who are trying to reach your new website by typing its old URL into their browser bar or clicking on an out-of-date link somewhere on social media or another site that hasn't been updated yet. If you have content available through both of these channels but they lead to different pages now, they'll be competing with each other for ranking power---and it's unlikely either will rank well unless one has better links than the other does (if there are any).
301 redirects are beneficial for SEO hosting clients for a number of reasons. Primarily, they help maintain and organize the website. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, which means that it will always go to the new URL regardless of how many times you click on it or how many pages you open in your browser. That means if someone enters an old URL into their browser, they'll be directed to the correct page without any issues! This can be especially important when there are multiple pages on a site with similar names but different purposes---for example, when one company has two pages about its products (one for regular customers and one for wholesale customers).
Redirects also allow businesses to update content on their sites without losing all prior links pointing at those old pages; this allows them to make ongoing improvements without needing multiple websites altogether. This helps cut down on costs while increasing efficiency at the same time!
A 301 redirect is a permanent way to redirect a URL to another one. The benefit of this is that it doesn't matter if you change your domain name, or if the original page goes down and gets replaced with something new, or even if your server gets hacked and someone tries to take over your website by changing all its URLs on their own. It will always keep pointing at the same thing --- literally forever (or until you decide otherwise).
So what does this mean for webmasters? If you want to restructure your website in some way (such as moving from a blog-type site into an e-commerce platform), then giving yourself a clean slate without having to worry about losing traffic from old links can make things much easier for everyone involved.
We hope this post has been useful for you and your SEO hosting clients. If you have any questions or would like more information on how a 301 redirect works, please contact us today. We are always here to help.