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301 Permanent Redirection Frustration
Yesterday I was speaking with a friend about their website and she told me something that got me annoyed. What she told me was that she had contacted her website hosting company to ask them to apply a permanent redirection to her website. I’ll get to my rant in a minute but before I do, let me explain what a permanent redirect is and why you should have one.
Google and the other search engines may view www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as two different websites, known as URL canonicalization. A 301 redirect tells the search engines that a page has moved permanently (a 302 is a temporary redirect).
A post by Matt Cutts Explains URL Canonicalization and 301 Redirections in greater detail here.
The main point here is what I have quoted below:
Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.aspBut technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
So, with this point in hand, I recommend that you forward yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com as this is what the majority of Internet users are already familiar with. You should also apply a 301 to any URL that points to the same homepage.
With a 301 redirect in place you are avoiding the spread of authority and your inbound link credit being shared across two websites.
For any URLs beyond your top level domain, example, www.yourdomain.com/page1 you can manually apply a 301 permanent redirect yourself (if your hosting account has this feature) if you change the URL to something different; www.yourdomain.com/page1 to www.yourdomain.com/page-1. Any visitor coming to your page from the old link will be redirect to your new URL without triggering a 404 page not found error message.
However, if you apply this for your homepage you will trigger a permanent loop, meaning that your website will NEVER load (it is redirecting one URL to another and back again making the redirect infinite).
Now, back to my rant. When my friend contacted her hosting account to ask for a permanent redirect to be applied to her site, redirecting the non www URL to the www URL, she was told that they would have to charge her for this. Seriously!
I host the majority of my sites with Host Monster and it takes me five minutes to log-in, get on the instant chat (they use a live chat agent to provide customer support), ask for a redirect to applied to a site and a minute or so later they say ‘it’s been done for you, is there anything else we can help you with?’.
Please, do not pay for a permanent redirect, if your hosting account says that you have to pay for this then I recommend you start looking for somewhere better to host your website. If they are going to charge you for this what else will they charge you for? My friend has already set up her account with Host Monster and is now getting the level of support that she requires and deserves, after all, she is a paying customer. Rant over…
To your success,
Karl Foxley
You can read an article that goes deeper into server side redirects and how to do them; you can read it here.
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