301 Redirects – Even Google can make a Mistake

I spent part of my morning discussing this topic with the tech department that hosts one our client’s sites. First of all, let me tell you what it is. It’s a simple command that tells your web browser and the search engines that a web page has been permanently moved to a new location. In this case, we’re telling the search engines and web browsers to redirect from http://ecreativeworks.com to http://www.ecreativeworks.com

Why?

Without the redirect, Google can see your home page as two separate pages instead of one, then split the PageRank between the two pages. So you could have a PageRank of 6 for the www page and a PageRank of 4 for the non www page. I’ve seen this happen to a site first hand. I don’t know for sure why it happened, but I have a guess. The site had several links (from other sites) pointing to the non www home page. The PageRank from those sites transferred to the non www page instead of the www page.

The odds of this happening are very slim. But seeing as the redirect is simple thing, and it will prevent this, that is why I advise my client’s sites to be set up this way.

Share this: