What is a 301 Redirect? Explained! | GreatestFart

301 Redirect

Have you ever wondered what a 301 Redirect is? If you have been one of those that has often wondered what it is, then feel free to read this post.

To begin with, this is a way to redirect your websites. Some of the ways that it can be used are as follows:

It can be used as a way to take an old site that you might have and point it to a new address

It can be used if you have a lot of domains that you want to point to one particular site

It can be used to display a certain version of your site

It can also be used if you want to change your URL structure.

There are a variety of ways to setup a 301 Redirect. We will list the most popular methods along with the code that can be used.

PHP Single Page Redirect

This code can be used when you want to redirect a static page to a new website address. You will want to put it into the index.php file.

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/page.html");
exit();
?>

Apache .htaccess Singe Page Redirect

This code is used when you are trying to redirect from an old page with no suffix to one that has a suffix. In this method, the code must be placed in an .htaccess file.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.html /new/http://www.domain.com/newpage.html

Apache .htaccess Canonical Redirect

This code can be used to redirect the visitors that are looking at the domain name to the site that is showing the www.domain

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

ASP Single Page Redirect

This code is used if you are using Active Server Pages.

<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader='Location','http://www.new-url.com/'
%>

ASP Canonical Redirect

You can use this code when using the Active Server Page platform. The code must be put into a script. This script must be run for every page on the serve before the page content begins.

<%
If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www."
& Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")
& Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")
End if
%>