We are often asked how a site can be moved from one service to another without losing any search engine optimization that the old site had garnered. The answer is very simple. All that needs to be done is to set up a 301 redirect from the old site to the new site. However, that would just be useful for the home page. But what about all of the other pages of a site? Again, the answer is simple. All that needs to be done is to set up a 301 redirect from the old page name to the new page name. Here is an image that was captured today when I did a search for 301 redirects. Read the description, which is the text that follows the date:
Let me use four live examples of how we at DDS.com use 301 redirects.
- From one domain to another – We use a 301 redirect for www.DMD.com to www.DDS.com. Google will penalize anyone who has more than one website with the same content at the same physical address and phone number. They want everyone to play as fairly as possible and more than one website at the same physical address and with the same phone number is considered duplicate content. Since we own DMD.com and the content we would have on that site is the same as we have at DDS.com, we use a 301 redirect to automatically send anyone visiting DMD.com to DDS.com.
- From an old page name to a new page name – When you want to transfer from one website service to a different service, 301 redirects can be set up so that visitors who have bookmarked a page on the old site can be 301 redirected to the new page name. The same goes for search engines that have “indexed” a page so that it appears in a search engine result when someone searches for a term that appears on that page. For example, we have a page that explains “meta tags” for dentists that was ranked #1, and still is as of the date this blog was written, for the search term “dental meta tags,” as shown in the screenshot below. We changed our website service and did not want to lose the ranking but the page name structure of our site was changing.
The old page name was www.DDS.com/meta_tags.htm and the new page name is www.DDS.com/dental-websites/Features/meta-tags/. It took about two minutes to log into our website editor, enter the old page name into our content management system for dentists, and click save as shown in the screenshot below. Anyone who had the old link saved or any search engine that had ranked the old page name can now access the new page name and all of the existing ranking is retained since, as far as the search engines are concerned, nothing has changed since the old link redirects to the new link.
- From a short page name to a longer page name – We like to use short page names as much as possible. Since a 301 redirect is built into our content management system for dental practices, we, as well as our dentists and their team members, can create a 301 redirect by typing and clicking. For example, we created a page about mobile websites for dentists and the page name is www.DDS.com/dental-websites/mobile-websites-for-dentists/. However, as you can see, that is very long. Therefore, after we created the page, we typed “/mobi/” into the proper place in our content management system as shown in the screenshot below, and that creates a 301 redirect from www.DDS.com/mobi to www.DDS.com/dental-websites/mobile-websites-for-dentists/. Yes, it is that easy.

- Your website should work with or without the “www” but it should not work both ways. The way you control this is, yes, with a 301 redirect. But don’t just take my word for it, type google.com, yahoo.com and www.twitter.com into a browser window, and what you will see is shown below. Google and Yahoo, and most websites display the “www” version but Twitter displays without the www. It doesn’t matter which way it works. What is important is that it works with or without but not both ways.

If you want to learn more about 301 redirects, please visit these links and watch the video below, which are all courtesy of Google.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633 301 redirects explained.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231 www or non-www explained.
Here is video from Matt Cutts, who is the head of the webspam team at Google. What that means is that he is in charge of how Google determines what is, and what is not, fair play on how search engines index a site.











