Here is a rock-solid fact: we – all of us – are losing a considerable amount of valuable search engine traffic due to non-existent content or incorrectly configured redirects. This is why efficiently handling redirects and 404 errors is very important for your SEO success. In this tutorial I'll show you how to handle these issues.

As a first step, let’s discuss about …

1. Redirects

So, what is a redirect on a website?

Redirection is the process of forwarding one URL to another URL. A way – and a common practice – to send both search engines and users to a different URL from the one they have originally requested.

The logical question arises: why do we need redirects? Well, there could be many different reasons, but here is a tiny list with the most common ones:

• duplicate content; when you have multiple versions of the same content, it can be difficult for search engines to determine which page is the correct one

• multiple domains; purchasing multiple domain names has become a quite common practice in these days; a lot of businesses do this to protect their online brand, to get additional traffic from common misspellings or simply to prevent competitors from buying similar domains

• changed domain name; sometimes it happens (for example, re-branding, acquisitions, etc) and obviously you don’t want to lose any of the hard earned incoming links you have built

• cleaning up dynamic URLs; when you have dynamically generated URLs, it’s always a good idea to make a redirection to a shorter SEO-friendly version

• redesigned websites

• newly acquired security (SSL) certificate; in this case your URL will start with “https://” instead of “http://”

• redirecting to files with different extensions; you may need to redirect the browser from the requested HTML file to a PHP version of the very same web page

• removed or replaced content and/or web pages

• redirecting specific files or folders from one domain to another

• expired content

• product pages with discontinued or temporarily unavailable products

• shortened or masked affiliate links

And so on. As you can see from the above examples, we are talking about pretty heavy issues here. Not using redirects or using the wrong ones, can – and usually will – have serious consequences. I am going to give you only one simple example: let’s assume that you have created a redirect which will automatically send the users and the search engines from yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com/blog; if something goes wrong and the search engine won’t be able to follow the redirect, most likely will assume that yourdomain.com has no content at all! And as you can guess, a similar scenario won’t help you to get better ranking …