What is a 301 redirect and why do seo agencies use them?
Introduction
When a business owner is looking to find the right SEO agency, it’s common to become confused by all of the marketing jargon that’s often used.
That’s to say when reading about seo on an agency’s website, often a lot of confusing jargon is used.
Sometimes this doesn’t stop when the company request a quote. That’s because more often than not the quote can accompanied by jargon that will explain what the company will do.
One such term that marketing agencies quote is that will correct 404 errors, and then implement 301 redirects.
This may sound rather complicated, but it is not. It is our agencies approach to explain things clearly, so if you would like to find out more about what a 301 redirect is, then this is the blog post for you.
What exactly is a 301 redirect?
Have you ever landed on a broken link? For example, you may have been shopping for a new appliance, say new washing machine, and you find a website that offers the item at the right price.
Yet, when you click on the link, it directs to a page that says “404 error”- this is a broken link.
Often this happens when a business sells new items, so there old stock is no longer advertised, and so the page is deleted.
However, sometimes a business will not want a visitor to land on a 404 page, so what they do is redirect the visitor to another page.
So, for example, if the 404 page was for a certain brand of washing machine, the 301 redirect may take the visitor to another washing machine manufactured by the same brand.
This is obviously beneficial for the business, as otherwise the visitor may have bounced off the website, and chosen a competitor to purchase the washing machine from instead.
Why should 404 pages be avoided?
404 pages can annoying for customers, as when they want to find a product or service, they do not want to land on a 404 page.
Plus, you may have backlinks that are sending “link juice” or “link equity” to that page, so if there is a 404 the link juice cannot be passed to that website.
As any good seo company will tell you, good quality backlinks are important. If some businesses were to lose their backlinks, then this often means that the website would drop in terms of where it ranks.
Backlinks are therefore an important ranking signals. This means if your website has a 404 page, then your marketing company, or website designer may want to add a 301 redirect, this is so link juice flows to the new page.
Permanent redirects
If a business has to use redirects, then sometimes the seo business will advise that 301-redirects are used. The main reason is that 301-redirects are considered a permanent redirect.
Whatever seo you are implementing, its important that all of the work is white hat. That’s to say, before any 301 redirects are implemented, then we recommend that you speak to a white hat marketing agency first.
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