Hi, i have been browsing through many forums and sites with regard to 301 redirects and have a few conerns. Firstly, some forums and sites i've been to state explicitly that a 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine friendly method of redirecting a domain and that by doing this you will not lose any page rank, ranking positions or backward links, yet others state that there is no certainty whether this will be the case or not. please can someone tell me what the deal is? i can't take any risks with my clients site and need to know what the facts are. the domain i want to redirect is http://www.westbury.co.uk/company_formation/companiesmadesimple/. it has a good PR and plenty of backward links. i need to redirect it to http://www.companiesmadesimple.com. Can someone please tell me what the best way would be to redirect without losing backward links, PR, etc. also, i'm a bit confused as to what a subdomain is. would the westbury.co.uk URL above be considered a subdomain. please clarify for me. Your help would be very very much appreciated. Many thanks in advance.
If you need to redirect you should be doing a 301 Redirect and that is the best option available to you. You will definitely see some dips in the traffic but as the time will pass Google will make the necessary back links move to the new domain but the dips will not be considerable if you do the 301 Redirect correctly. All I have suggested is not based on any document but past experience of many.
thanks for that! And what would be the correct way to do the redirect? i'm not a programmer so i'm not too clued up on this.
Just check the server header to see you get as 301. And to check the server header you need too Google it out. There are lots of them available
