Posted on April 15, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
301 redirects
Our previous article How Canonical URL Redirects (301 Redirects) Can Affect Your Search Rankings provided a brief overview of the effects a lack of canonical (301) redirects can have on your search rankings. Today we would like to tell you how to correct this issue on the major platforms.
A couple of notes to mention regarding the following instructions:
o For ASP platforms, you will need to create a script to be executed before the content on each page of the site.
- The Single Page redirects will only transfer one specified page to another individual page.
- For redirects on Apache servers:
o Create .htaccess file on root directory of site
o For sites hosted using Windows, you will need to contact your host provider
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Posted on April 2, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
How many home pages?
Have you noticed that when you type certain URLs, they are automatically redirected? For instance, whether you type market-vantage.com, market-vantage.com/index.php, www.market-vantage.com/index.php or www.market-vantage.com they all resolve to the same URL www.market-vantage.com/. This is called a “Canonical URL Redirect” or a “301 Redirect”. Now unfortunately, a lot of websites don’t have this redirect which can negatively affects their search rankings, though you probably don’t mind if they are your competition.
There are two reasons missing URL redirects is an issue: the page is seen as multiple pages and the “multiple pages” are seen as having duplicate content. Here is a brief look at both of these potential problems.
1. There are a number of different factors search engines look at to determine the page ranking of a website. For instance, Google uses about 200 signals in its algorithm. When Google looks at your home page, one of the elements it looks at is the number of page views your website has received. If your home page comes up as three different pages then, in essence, it may be competing against itself for rankings. So having them all redirect to one page is beneficial.
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