Brian's Tip of the Week #1 - Avoiding Unnecessary 301's

I've decided to put together a small tip of often over-looked on-page SEO tips and tricks that extend a bit beyond the core vBSEO product. I'll try to release a new tip about once a week or so.

Avoiding Unnecessary 301's
Nov. 12, 2009 - Tip of the Week #1

301, or the http status code for 'moved permanently', is a convenient method of moving a URI. Not only does it direct old-url/ to new-url/, it also notifies smarter search bots (such as Google, Bing, etc) that the content at old-url/ should now be referred to and accessed via new-url/.

However, there is one purposeful set back to the 301. The old-url/ will be dropped from the index. And, if included in the sitemap, it will throw a warning about the old-url/ not being accessible in webmaster tools. In theory, it's necessary to avoid duplicate indexed URIs in the search engines. But, it also leaves the door open to common mistakes.

The ultimate goal is to have no 'old-url/' links anywhere on your site. I've noticed this a lot on many of our customers' forums, especially those using a homepage powered by vBa or WordPress.

Many times, the navigation is unique to those non-vb pages, and such, you need to make your own links.

So, without further ado, today's tip:
Be certain to ALWAYS link to the true and final destination.

If your forums are in /forums/ be sure to link it to /forums/, NOT /forums (without the trailing slash). These are, in fact, two different pages. The former is a /folder/ (correct) and the later is a /page with no extension (incorrect). vBSEO will auto-redirect /forums to /forums/ and will also replace various 301'ed "go to post" links across your forum with the *true* destination. However, vBSEO does not work on pages outside the forum/vb-generated pages (unless you have coded it to do so via our extensibility functions). The end result is that the weight on the anchor on your homepage nav to your forums is effectively null and void, as it returns a 301. Google has recently stepped up its algorithm recently to count anchor text in SERP ranking.

Take a few minuets this week to go over your non-vB-powered nav templates and check your links for 301's. It's a simple fix that could be costing you a lot of traffic.

it's kind of Twitterish (if that's even a word), but I like it, and I like the idea
(also, it's a great idea for people who've only recently set up a forum; the ... of the week I mean)

Thanks for the suggestion, and keep it up!

Keep up the good work, Brian.

my version of vbseo doesn't seem to redirect forums to forums/

help?

You'll need to be more specific about your exact issue. Please start a new thread with any trouble shooting requests so as to not clutter this article.