I’ve been migrating my Web site from blogspot.com to my own domain and a friend who is SEO savvy told me that all the redirects I do should be 301’s. I have no idea what that means. Dave, what’s a 301 redirect and why does it matter?
That’s a great question, actually, because it affects a lot of Web sites, my own included. In fact, it’s possible that you ended up on this very page because of a 301 redirect, actually.
But let’s start at the beginning, so you know what we’re talking about…
At its most rudimentary, the hypertext transport protocol (the “http” in all those URLs you see) is a back and forth discussion between your Web browser and a Web server somewhere on the Internet.
The discussion goes like this:
browser: I want homepage.html
server: Here is homepage.html
(stream of data)
browser: Now I want logo.png
server: Sorry, I do not have logo.png
Turns out that every response from the server has an assigned numeric code. For example, “404” is the numeric code for the latter response where the requested data item wasn’t found and therefore couldn’t be sent. In this case, “404 logo.png not found” is a more realistic response for our example.
Heck, even success has a numeric code: 200. You can read all the status codes if you’re curious, but let’s just jump ahead to this situation:
browser: I want newpage.html
server: oh. that’s now known as http://newdomain.com/newerpage.html
There are two possibilities for this address forwarding, that it’s temporary (think ‘server down, here’s an error page until we fix things’) or that it’s a permanent redirect (think ‘we moved, this is our forwarding address’). In the former case, a temporary redirect is known as a 307 while a permanent redirect is, you guessed it, a 301.
In this case, if the redirect is indeed permanent, the protocol dialog should look like this:
browser: I want newpage.html
server: 301 http://newdomain.com/newerpage.html
browser (switches to newdomain.com): I want newerpage.html
server: Here is newerpage.html
(stream of data)
See how that works? Here’s what Google says about 301 redirects, direct from its Webmaster Guidelines:
Got it? Great.
These redirects are created and exist on the old server under the old domain, logically enough, so I’ll wrap up by offering you this helpful link to an article on 301 redirects from the Google Webmaster Central Blog. it talks about blogspot.com and blogger.com migration too.
Good luck, and let us know how it goes!
301 redirect means it is simply telling search engines that site has moved from old domain to new domain as like you said from http://www.domain.blogspot.com http://www.domain.com. 301 helps to transfer link juice from old domain to new domain so that we wont loose our traffic and position in search engines and even our pagerank