Q and A: What is the best way to redirect old urls to new urls?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks to your great tips, my site is doing terrific in the search engines.

I rearranged some directories on the site and now have some url's which should be changed. Can I do redirects from the old url's to new url's? Regardless of the time and effort involved, what is the absoulute best way of doing this without losing any ranking?

Thanks as always,
Lisa

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lisa

Glad to hear of your site's success! Thanks for sharing it with us.

Regarding redirecting your old URLs to your new ones, there are a couple of ways:

1) You can set up 301 Permanently Moved redirects from old urls to new urls from within your hosting control panel. Simply login to your panel and look for a link under "Site Management" called "Redirects". Enter the old url in the field prompt and the new page url you want people taken to. This will automatically create the redirects in your .htaccess file. If you don't have access to your hosting control panel, your hosts should be able to set this up for you. Read the article Turn Harmful 404 Error Pages Into Helpful 301 Redirects for more information on this technique.

2) If you don't need visitors to be re-directed to a unique page, but simply don't want to lose traffic via outdated page listings in the search engines, then create a custom 404 error page with a link to your home page, site map or site search tool on it. You can see an example custom 404 page here on our site.

That way, whenever a visitor clicks on an outdated link in a search engine or non-existent URL from another site, instead of arriving at the standard ugly white 404 error page, they are taken to an actual page on your site and encouraged to dig deeper rather than to click away.

Hope this helps! *

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