In building a website it’s important to build a product that caters to both the search engine and user experience. URL Redirects are often overlooked in the website development process. While URL Redirects are a very small part of the website experience and are not primary front-end pages they serve a very functional purpose.
Ok but what are URL Redirects?
URL Redirects are a way to prepare for duplicated, broken, or otherwise compromised links and pages. The most common use of these is when pages are moved to different web addresses. These usually appear as 301(temporary) or 302(permanent) link move redirects. Other common redirects include 400(bad request) and 404(document not found) redirects
What’s important about making custom URL Redirects?
Redirects serve three main purposes; forwarding traffic, forwarding authority, and improving overall experience. The first and most important purpose of redirects is traffic forwarding. Redirects forward traffic from one URL to another when the old URL no longer exists. The other very similar aspect is authority forwarding. This happens when backlinks link to a page that has been moved
Another purpose is to improve the overall UX. Both of the previous purposes obviously serve technical and optimization purposes, however, they also serve as a way to make the website more cohesive.
URL redirects improve the user experience in a few ways. The first is the general website aesthetic and feel of your website. Sites like Amazon have used their redirects to improve their branding with their Amazon Pups.
Ultimately you want to use your redirects to prevent users prevent users from landing on broken or duplicated pages. For example, if an old page is moved to a new page, a redirect will send visitors to the new page instead of the old one. This helps ensure visitors get to the correct page.
URL Redirects serve a third purpose and that is to improve your website’s crawlability. If you have broken links the SE Bot won’t be able to properly index your website. If you have moved, duplicated, or deleted links the bot won’t be able to index your good content, and ultimately it will negatively impact your effectiveness.
Redirects let search engines know when a page has moved, where it moved, and if the move is temporary or permanent. If you don’t have redirects the SE Bot will potentially crawl pages without content and will decrease your SE Rank.
2 Responses
I liked how you explained URL redirects very clearly, because I knew what they were but only to an extent. I like how you included specific redirects as well as examples.
I enjoyed this post. Redirects are often over looked by businesses but it is a big are for them to be creative and take advantage of.