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Redirecting Your Site Visitors: How to Give Them a Safe, Happy Landing

What is a redirect and when do you need it?

The Internet today is much more competitive than it was several years ago, so Webmasters are constantly searching for effective site formulas that will ensure targeted traffic and high conversions. Webmasters change, update, rewrite, and optimize their sites’ content and structure day after day. As time passes, the task becomes more difficult as it involves more risks. For instance, what if a top ranking or high Google PageRank is lost? To avoid unwanted consequences, Webmasters use redirects.

A Web page redirect is a transfer to a different Web page when a browser attempts to access a page at a certain address. There are two major forms of Web page redirection: client-side and server-side redirections. Use a server-side redirect as the best and safest way to communicate a Web page’s destination URL to a search engine. The client-side one is a big NO from the SEO standpoint, because generally search engines are not as perfect as browsers in understanding client-side scripts (such as JavaScript) and because of the abuse of the meta-refresh command by unethical Webmasters.

You should use redirect to:

• Redirect users and bots from the old location of a given Web page to the new location;

• Automatically redirect users from an old domain to a new domain;

• Automatically redirect users from all alternate TLDs to the main TLD (most often to the .com);

• Correct the canonical URL issue (non-www pages and www ones or site.com/index and site.com/);

• Prevent unauthorized users and bots from accessing live development environments, and redirect them to the main site (IP-specific delivery).

SEO-friendly redirects

In the HTTP protocol used by the World Wide Web, a redirect is a response with a status code beginning with 3 that induces a browser to go to another location. The HTTP standard defines several status codes for redirection: 300 – multiple choices (e.g. offer different languages); 301 – moved permanently; 302 – found (e.g. temporary redirect); 303 – see other (e.g. for results of cgi-scripts); 307 – temporary redirect. We will speak about 301 and 302 redirects.

How do search engines react to server-side redirects?

A 302 redirect is a temporary one, so search engines interpret it as an instruction to index the old URL but the new content. It keeps the old URL because the server has said the new one is only “temporary.”

A 301 is a permanent redirect, so search engines interpret it as an instruction to replace the old URL with the new one. The new URL will rank in the same location as the old URL, because the links and anchor text that point to the old URL will now be transferred to the new URL.

Thus, you should choose the 301 redirect when you move your site or pages permanently. Besides, search engines recommend using it.

Before redirecting…

1. You should have a list of all your current site’s indexed pages (and their URLs), as well as the indexed pages with backlinks, and the scheme of the translations from the OLD to the NEW.
2. You should also know how to track your broken links and orphan pages. Web CEO Site Auditor tool will be a great help here.
3. Create a report for all your indexed pages and all the pages with backlinks. Use Web CEO tools for the reports – Ranking Checker to get a list of your indexed pages and Link Popularity Analyzer to find pages with backlinks.

All the above steps are important because your lists will help you specify redirects properly and avoid having distressing losses. In addition, you can give up unimportant pages such as ones that are not being indexed and don’t have backlinks.

When the redirects are done, give search engines both a new site map AND the old one, so they can find the 301s faster.

How to do redirects

Here are some technical recommendations on how to create redirects:

WebConfs: How to create redirects

Ask Apache: SEO search-friendly redirects without mod rewrite

McAnerin Networks: IIS redirects – 301, 302

Mattias Geniar: Using proper header redirects in PHP

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for March 2009.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors. Learn more about the formula.

Experts explain why redirects are highly recommended:

What to expect:

• Major site overhauls will result in anything from a 20 percent drop in traffic to being completely dropped from the index.

• Recovery time is generally six to 18 weeks. After one week, you can expect to see traffic coming back at a rate of 15 percent week over week.

• Long tail traffic will suffer more than anything else.

Recovery:

• Analytics should show an increase in traffic of between 10-20 percent week over week once recovery has begun.

• Reports showing indexed pages will reveal more and more of the new pages, and a concurrent decline in the number of the old URLs, week over week.

Carolyn Shelby
Director of Natural Search
BeFoundLocal.com

Whenever people are tempted not to do the right thing, the Golden Rule is a reminder to “treat others the same way that you want them to treat you”.

The Internet era rewrote that rule, and now a similar maxim regulates relationships between webmasters, search engines and visitors to sites. So when a webmaster is thinking about using a questionable technique, the new rule recommends walking in the site visitor’s shoes. “Do it for your site visitors, and not for search engines.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Creating regional versions of a site is one of those questionable techniques.

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Country-specific Sites and Duplicate Content Filters: Scout, Scout, You Are Out!

Search engines consider duplicate content a sort of weed that must be eradicated in order to show users only the most relevant pages. So if Google’s index includes multiple URLs that lead to the same content, Google uses the “Duplicate Content Filter” to refine search results and ensure that only unique pages are returned to its users.

Ideally, a multi-national company should maintain separate sites for each country – this way search engines can easily determine which site to show searchers from different countries.

But what if you have only one domain and several versions of your site in the same language (say, English) and want to target several English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, India, the UK, the USA) with the proper country-specific version of the site? This means your site has duplicate content and Google will filter the duplicates and leave the “original” on, at its discretion (for instance, all Google users will be served only the USA version that is no good for them).

So, if you don’t have regional domains for every country you operate in, and you host all the content on the same domain, do the following:

1. Create a subdomain or a subfolder for each version of your regional content. Plan your site architecture depending on your possibilities and conditions.
2. Localize the content; re-write pages so that visitors from each of your targeted countries can find those pages useful.
3. Place a portion of unique content on a page that has duplicate content. Most SEOs nowadays agree that 30% of the content on each page should be unique. You may use the random content method (add a poll to your page, or any dynamically renewing content such as a box with a local weather feed if it makes sense for your site) to make a part of page content unique..
4. Set the target location for your site visitors in Google Webmaster Tools.
   You can specify individual subfolders and subdomains of your site as targeted for regional audiences. In order to do so, you need to add each of the subfolders or subdomains to the Webmaster Tools and set the geotarget for each of them.

   If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, Google will continue to make geographic associations largely based on the country-specific domain (for example, .co.uk or .de) and the IP address of the web server that delivers the content.

   Note: The tool handles geographic data, not language data. If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language, you probably should not limit yourself to a specific geographic location.

5. Add your business location to Google Local Business Center; this will bring local visitors who search the Google Maps.
6. Get linked from regional sites; this will help your site’s country-specific version to rank higher in the regional search results.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines.
Yahoo and Live are losing their positions, while Google’s share has grown over the year.

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites. Although social media are playing an important role as referrers, search engines still remain at the top. SEO efforts are worth applying.

Hear what experts say

“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”

Google Webmaster Tools

“If you have your site set to detect a visitor’s location and show content based on that, do one of the following:

• Serve a unique URL for distinct content: redirect English visitors to mysite.com/en and Australian visitors to mysite.com/au.

• Provide links to enable visitors (and seach engines) to access other language/country content. Or, simply present visitors with a home page that enables them to choose the country. You can always store the selection in a cookie so vistors are redirected automatically after the first time. “

Vanessa Fox, Google