How to setup a 301 Redirect

Daniel

background image

The “301 Permanent Redirect” is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for redirecting websites. You can use it in several situations, including:

  • to redirect an old website to a new address
  • to setup several domains pointing to one website
  • to enforce only one version of your website (www. or no-www)
  • to harmonize a URL structure change

There are several ways to setup a 301 Redirect, below I will cover the most used ones:

PHP Single Page Redirect

In order to redirect a static page to a new address simply enter the code below inside the index.php file.

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/page.html");
exit();
?>

PHP Canonical Redirect

The Canonical 301 Redirect will add (or remove) the www. prefixes to all the pages inside your domain. The code below redirects the visitors of the http://domain.com version to http://www.domain.com.

<?php
if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www') {
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://www.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']
.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}
?>

Apache .htaccess Singe Page Redirect

In order to use this method you will need to create a file named .htaccess (not supported by Windows-based hosting) and place it on the root directory of your website, then just add the code below to the file.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm /new/http://www.domain.com/newpage.htm

Apache .htaccess Canonical Redirect

Follow the same steps as before but insert the code below instead (it will redirect all the visitors accessing http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

ASP Single Page Redirect

This redirect method is used with the Active Server Pages platform.

<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader='Location','http://www.new-url.com/'
%>

ASP Canonical Redirect

The Canonical Redirect with ASP must be located in a script that is executed in every page on the server before the page content starts.

<%
If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www."
& Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")
& Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")
End if
%>

Browse all articles on the SEO category

83 Responses to “How to setup a 301 Redirect”

  • cachiladomr

    ricacelcaal

  • MaiURL

    thanx bro.. i search many at google.. but your tips is better..

  • Chris

    Great article!
    But I do have a question about the www or no www
    Where exactly do I add this code? .htaccess file?

  • Ashwini

    I have a question.
    I currently work on blogger domain and will soon shift to a custom domain.301 redirect will be enough to transfer the google juice but does the same goes for Technorati?

  • Jerry Peters

    The ASP Canonical Redirect code above is for redirecting the non-www domain name to the www domain name. What is the code if you are going the opposite direction–redirecting from the www domain name to the non-www domain name?

    Also, I assume the code is placed at the top of every page before the and tags. Is this correct?

    Thanks in advance for your help on this.

  • Outlaw

    Very interesting info. However did anyone have any experience with trailing slashes at the end of subdirectory on your domain. For instance:
    domain.com/folder and
    domain.com/folder/
    how are these treated? I saw some of people having problems with that and both pages indexed. any htaccess ideas on that?

  • Tricia

    I’m using a 301 redirect on my main blog feverishthoughts.com to include the www. The problem is that I have a few other blogs on this domain that I put in directories ie feverishthoughts.com/oddplanet. I want the directory blogs to have urls that do not contain the www because they have higher PR without the www in their urls, yet the main domain has a higher PR with the www in it’s url.

    So I’ve been using the nowww plugin on my directory blogs to keep the www out of the urls. I suspect this might actually be causing a bit of a problem on a few of the blogs because now they occasionally have the primary domain thewebfiles in their url as well if it’s accessed without a trailing slash. for example the Odd Planet blog sometimes converts it’s urls to feverishthoughts.thewebfiles.com/oddplanet

    I’d like to use an htaccess redirect to keep the www out my directory urls so I could avoid using the plugin. I’ve also read that the plugin might be using more cpu resource in my account and I’ve just had a terrible experience with web hosts and cpu resource over use so I want to trim down.

    Do you have any idea what htaccess redirect I might use to solve my problem?

  • Daniel

    TechZilo, maybe it is something related to your host then.

    The easiest option now is just to go to Google Webmaster tools, verify your blog and choose a “Preferred Domain”, that way Google at least will know what version it should use.

  • TechZilo

    I tried the plugin,but it took down the blog.
    i tried the php one, but it didnt work. can you explain in detail?

  • Daniel

    Did you try the PHP one? If the PHP words there is no need to use an .htaccess redirect. Also there is a plugin that does this job, check this post:

  • TechZilo

    I don’t have an htaccess file now, and need to upload one. My FTP client, fireftp, doesnt allow upload of .htaccess file

    I tried uploading a txt and renaming it to .htaccess
    it didnt work either.

    how can i set up htaccess redirect now?

  • Daniel

    Put it in the beginning, but it should not matter.

  • TechZilo

    Yes, Canonical redirect. Where in header? at the beginning, middle or end?

  • Daniel

    Which one, the PHP Canonical redirect?

    This one go on the header.php file on your theme.

  • TechZilo

    I couldn’t understand the second method, ie non-www to www redirect. Where should I place the code? .htaccecss?

  • Ranjana

    Hi Daniel,

    The problem is it does not get resolved to http://www.aaa.in, it stays as http://www.abc.com

    As a result “http://www.abc.com” is still in the search results and “http://www.abc.com” is not getting the required exposure.

    How do I tackle that?

    Thanks.

    Regards
    Ranjana

  • Daniel

    Renjana, if http://www.abc.com is pointing to http://www.aaa.in, people will already get forwarded there, there is no need to setup a 301 in that case.

  • Ranjana

    Hi,

    We have several domains pointing to the same web site.

    For instance – http://www.abc.com, http://www.xyz.net,
    http://www.efg.co.in

    Our main domain name is – http://www.aaa.in

    All the above mentioned domains and the main domain point to the same server… as in
    there is only one folder for these domains.

    How do I incorporate .htaccess in this case?

    I mean I do not have separate folders for any of these domains but I want that if any one

    types in “http://www.abc.com”, it should get resolved to “http://www.aaa.in”.

    One of the domains is very old and is registered in search engines. I do not want to lose out on that. Am desperately looking for a solution to this problem.

    I hope I have been able to explain the situation properly.

    Thanks.

    Regards
    Ranjana

  • FilterInternet

    What should I do if my virtual host provider do not configure IIS to do redirect for me? My host use html+asp.

  • 局域网监控

    靠，虚拟主机提供商不帮我做301重定向怎么办？ 我的空间是html+asp。

  • Mexxep

    test

  • praguebuzz
  • bohemianbiz

    wow, many many thanks. I used the .htaccess way, and it worked like a charm. now i understand why sometimes I see a google page rank of 4 and sometimes 0 on a site of mine. those nasty “wwww” makes huge difference.

  • Affiliate Manager

    For the most part I’ve been trying to make sure all of my sites just have the redirect for www. to the non www. For one, it’s a lot easier and quicker to type in the non “www” and if I’m going to submit my sites to hundreds of directories, it can save a lot of time.

    So, I personally go with non “www.” 🙂

  • Enblogopedia

    Well I think it`s the easiest way,
    check this article. I don’t mess with my file templates..and I think the code is true but I want the “OKAY” from a prof. that`s all. :s

  • Daniel

    Enblogopedia, I am not sure about changing the URL structure with .htaccess. I tried it sometime ago with PHP, but it was a mess.

    I will let you know if I find something online.

  • Enblogopedia

    I want to change my permalinks from
    http://www.enblogopedia.com/2007/02/10/what-ever/
    to:
    http://www.enblogopedia.com/what-ever/

    I believe the code will be something like this:

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+) http: //www.enblogopedia.com/$1

    (of course with out the line break!)
    Am I right?!

  • Bes Z

    Sorry if this is a repost, for some reason I pressed the “Say it!” button and I got refreshed and sent back to this page and couldn’t see my comment [you can delete my earlier comment if it goes through].

    Nice work, Daniel. 🙂 I am going to use it as one of my cheat sheets now.

    For WordPress users who change their permanent links [permalinks] and wish to use 301 redirects to point users, search engines and others to the new urls, Dean Lee created a migration plugin which does just that:

    http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

    Of course, it only works on WP pages and not pages created outside of WP.

    Thanks for sharing. 🙂

  • Daniel

    Lionel, that is a good way to solve the problem of redirecting single files without affecting the whole website, thanks for sharing.

  • Lionel Young

    Sometimes you need to create a dummy file if you want to do a permanent/temporary redirect. When I switched over to WordPress, I had to redirect index.html to index.php, but the .htaccess in your root folder will affect subfolders — this means your add-on and subdomains.

    All my add-on domains were redirecting to the root domain, and had to create a dummy index.html in the root folder for the HTTP_HOST condition to trigger.

    #Redirect only for elegantcab, and not add-on domains
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?elegantcab\.com
    RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.elegantcab.com/index.php [R=301,L,N]

    So if you’re having problems, try creating a dummy file.

Comments are closed.