301 Re-directs

When a webmaster tells us that his or her site has fallen out of our search results, we often find that it’s still included. To quickly determine whether your site is still in our index, just perform a Google site search for its entire URL. A search for [ site:www.google.com ], for instance, returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site:www.google.com

If your site is displayed as a result when you perform a Google site search for your URL, then it’s included in our index.

If you are simply moving a page or a directory from one place to another, setting up a redirect is relatively easy to do. Open up your .htaccess file (or create a new file that you will call .htaccess) and paste in the following line:

Redirect 301 page.html http://www.somesite.com/somenewlocation.html

In the above line all you need to do is replace the ‘page.html’ with the page or directory that is being moved and replace the ‘http.://www.somesite.com/somenewlocation.html’ with the location of the new file. That’s all there is to it! A search engine spider will now know that if it tries to access page.html, it should update its listing to the new location given.This could also work for changing your domains as well. If you are changing domains, you would write:

Redirect 301 / http.://newwebsitedomain.com/