301 Redirects — How Not to Loose Your SEO Rankings when Moving Website

By Harish Sharma
what is 301 redirect

How to do 301 at domain level

Last week we were asked by one of our client — Translumina to merge their two domains — translumina.in and translumina.com. The company, now headquartered in Delhi, India is on growth acceleration, they recently acquired the company in Germany and they wanted to have single website and be able to provide information to users based on their location viz International and Indian Subcontinent to begin with. They hired us (Varshyl Technologies) as consultant for their SEO strategy.

Content is king

We know that how important it is to present the right information/content to the user, average attention span of users now-a-days is in seconds and if you don’t show them the information they are looking for, they will close the browser tab and will move on.
After careful study of the products offering, we recommended to show content based user geographic location. It was decided to have just one website — translumina.com as main website, which would be global face of the company and country specific content to presented as for example India as— translumina.com/in and like wise more regions can be added in future.

The website structure..

The website was built on WordPress and we have expertise of over 15 years working on it. To keep it simple for the Translumina, we created 2 WordPress installations — One for tranlumina.com and second as sub-directory — translumina.com/in/

301 Redirect — Keep SEO Rankings..

Now as translumina.in was already in existence for quite some time and had been indexed by Google. We did not want it to loose the rankings and hence we recommended doing 301 permanent redirects. What this basically tells the Search engines is that page has been moved to new location and hence update your index/database with new URLs without affecting the rankings.

How to do 301 at domain level..

The best and recommended way is to handle it using htaccess. I won’t recommend doing it using PHP. Why htaccess, it can be separate post for that (for now please google it and you will easily find the answer).

Below is the sample code that we used , it should be added to old website where you want to add the redirection. In our case we added this to translumina.in —

# BEGIN 301 redirect to domain.com to domain.com/in

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)$ https://domain.com/in/$1

</IfModule>

# END 301 redirect

Basically this redirects all traffic on translumin.in and its subpages to translumina.com.

Hope this helps someone looking for right and easy way to handle domain wide redirections.

Author

  • Harish Sharma

    Entrepreneur and Technology Enthusiast | Started Varshyl Technologies, a web and mobile application development company, helping companies build and promote their digital presence. Co-founded Snapworks - a mobile first communication platform for schools. Outside VT, enjoys his morning workouts, reading biographies and golf.

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