Forum

[mark schaaf]

I have been reading a little about 301 redirect and new web pages that replace an old page and don't really understand what it is really for. What I read here and other places it that you use them mostly to send traffic from an old page that you are replacing with a new one so you don't loose the links to the page or page rank. What I don't understand is if you are replacing the page with a new page why not just name the new page the exact as the old page. I kind of did something similar with my site. I took most of my pages and changed the look of the page and moved some things around so the pages looks different. I kept the same articles, same tags, same everything and when I uploaded the new version nothing seemed to change. All my stats in google webmaster tools stayed the same my page rank stayed the same and my site stayed about the same in search results. So my question is if someone were to completely remake a web page on there site and use almost everything from the original page and just load it and delete the original page. If the page name is the same and all the information is the same why would it mater. I know on my site I didn't make brand new pages I took the ones I had and modified them a lot but it seems like it is about the same thing. Any ideas Thanks Mark

 

[Cecille L]

Hi Mark,

301 redirects are applied when there is a change in the webpages location/URL/permalink. An example would be moving my webpage http://www.domain.com/article1 to a folder/category which would then make it's new link http://www.domain.com/category/article1. If I have built links to that old URL http://www.domain.com/article1 then I would need to redirect it so that it goes to the new URL where the page is located. Otherwise, any traffic going to http://www.domain.com/article1 will get a Page Not Found error or something similar.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!