Using a 301 redirect can be a great benefit in some cases when working on your website. This article will help you identify what is a 301 redirect and how it should be used.

301 redirect is a type of redirect which you can put on a webpage to redirect the traffic which comes to it to a new specific URL, hence the name redirect. 301 redirect is very simple to create and can save you a great deal of hardship later.

Why would you want to use a redirect?

Lets say you are opening a brand-new website in a different location on the Internet. That website is on an existing topic or theme which you already wrote about on an older website of yours. Not only will you want any traffic which still goes to that old URL to be automatically redirected to your new location, but you want the link juice which that older URL accumulated, as well.

Link juice is a term to describe the benefits which existing links can create for a web page in terms of search engine optimization. So if you hold the number one spot in Google for a given search term, much of that is attributed to the amount of link juice which you have coming towards that page which holds the number one spot. You likely spent a great deal of time building a lot of links to your site to secure that top spot in the first place, and consequently you obviously don’t want to lose your link juice just because you’re moving that older site to newer more ideal location for whatever reason, so what you’re going to use is a redirect.

To answer the specific question what is a 301 redirect, this is a permanent redirect as opposed to a 302 or 307 redirect which is considered a temporary redirect. So getting back to our example, if we started a new site which was set to take the place of the old site indefinitely, we would use a 301 redirect because it’s permanent and that way we can keep the link juice from that old site as well as any traffic which happens upon it. A 302/307 would be used, for example, if we were revamping or tweaking an existing site but in the meantime we wanted to temporarily divert any traffic which comes to that URL to another site.