Website Redirects
For those of us in the marketing world, website redirects can feel like something for the IT department to deal with. But there are some key concepts marketers need to understand so they can be sure something as basic as a redirect doesn’t destroy the reputation of your site. Today we’ll look at what redirects are, and why marketers need to care about them.
What is a website redirect?
Imagine: your firm has an incredibly popular product. Media mentions, backlinks, the whole ball of wax. It’s been years, and over that time, those product pages on your site have built up a truckload of authority.
But the product is evolving, it will be better than ever, and you’re building a new site to showcase Product 2.0. Large numbers of people will still try to access your old product page, and you need a way to seamlessly move them along to the new page.
Enter website redirects. Think of them as the digital forwarding address of your page. Someone clicks an old link that goes to your old page and they are magically redirected to your shiny new page in the blink of an eye.
Why should marketing teams care about redirects?
Your original product, the one that had been around for years? Over all that time, it has been accumulating serious internet clout. People have linked to it, mentioned it in the press, or otherwise signaled to search engines that it should be considered an authority on the subject. Good for you, but if you get the redirect wrong, all that magic goes away in an instant.
There are two types of redirects: 301’s and 302’s. According to the best practices laid out by Moz, the 301 redirect will preserve your authority and send it along to the new page, while the 302 will not.
Think of it this way: the 301 tells search engines, “This is our new home, forward all that respect here.” while the 302 says “We’ll be back soon, don’t bother forwarding that authority.”
So redirects are there to preserve your reputation as your site grows and evolves. But that’s not all. They also protect user experience.
Redirects Go Beyond SEO
Redirects aren’t only for use when making new products. Any time you need to merge blog posts, or clean up URLs, or change a product name, you run the risk of creating dead ends along the trail of user experience.
Nothing stops the customer’s flow, or makes them question your capability, quite like the dreaded 404 page. They want to move along the funnel, but a dead link stops them cold. That friction, says google, can be enough to make them lose trust and bounce.
By prioritizing clean architecture from the very beginning of the design process, Punch builds websites that are beautiful, fast, and a dream for users to explore. Keep your authority where it belongs.
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