There comes a time in every bloggers life when you want to move on and move your blog to a new address. How can this be done in the best possible way without loosing Page Rank and visitors?
The most popular and the best way of redirecting a visitor is to use the Redirect 301 code. Redirect 301 is another way of telling Google that this site has been moved permanently and as of now it can be found on another address. In addition to redirect 301 you can use redirect 302, but that is only a temporary solution which will not forward any Page Rank or link juice to the new address, quite different from the redirect 301 which sends all link juice on to the new address.
Redirect 301 in action
Enough about the theory. The question is how to use redirect 301 in action! If you have a WordPress blog and want to redirect a single post or a page to another address there are great plugins that can help you do so. One such plugin that we have frequently used ourselves is Simple 301 Redirects. It is extremely easy to use and it kind of explains itself.
The more common way of using redirect 301 is to manually edit your .htaccess file and add the redirect requests there. The .htaccess file is normally located in your root directory (for example in WordPress), but if you do not find such a file you can create one in Notepad and upload it yourself. The name of the file should be “.htaccess”.
Redirect 301 in .htaccess
If you want to redirect all traffic to http://www.yoursite.com/subdirectory/ to http://www.newsite.com/ you can use the following parameters.
RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /subdirectory/(.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1
In this case traffic coming to for example www.yoursite.com/subdirectory/greatarticle.php will be forwarded to www.newsite.com/greatarticle.php
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If you want to forward people coming to a certain address to one special address you can use the following code:
RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /olddirectory/oldarticle.php http://www.howtobloginfo.net
If you use this code and add it to your .htaccess all traffic heading to the oldarticle.php will be forwarded to the address written afterwards (in this case www.howtobloginfo.net).
We hope these small instructions will help you move your site from one address to another. You should though be aware of the fact that a redirect 301 might harm your Page Rank and your Google ranking, so unless it is necessary you should consider not moving your site or a single page to a new address.
