The importance of URL redirects

Does that sound familiar to you?

When choosing a new designer, it’s important to discuss page redirects with them. As a website design firm, it kills me to see business owners lose previously gained traction with search engines like Google and Bing because the design firm they choose did not properly redirect pages when URLs were changed.

Are you asking yourself “what is a page redirect?” Let me explain.

Let’s say I am redesigning Blue Ink Web’s website. Our current URL for copywriting is https://www.blueinkweb.com/copywriting but in keeping with the modern best practices, I decide to reformat the URL to https://www.blueinkweb.com/services/copywriting. But I didn’t include a 301 redirect when we relaunched the site, that could pose problems down the road. Let’s say you search “copywriting” and Blue Ink Web appears in your results, but the old page is the one that pops up in your search due to previous search history. If you click on the link you’ll be brought to a 404 “page not found” error, because the original page no longer exists.

A 301 redirect pushes anyone that might find the old link, whether through their own browsing history or search engine results, to the new page. So despite https://www.blueinkweb.com/copywriting appearing in the search results, when clicked, all users will be taken to your new revamped page, https://www.blueinkweb.com/services/copywriting. 

It may seem like a small task, but many firms out there will charge additional fees for such a service. With Blue Ink Web, we catalog all existing pages and generate 301 redirects whenever necessary as a standard practice.

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