301 Redirecting old pages using cPanel
22 Mar
So you’ve just completed a massive overhaul of your website, maybe to a new domain, or maybe you’ve just revamped your site’s site structure and need old pages to redirect to updated locations. So how do you do it?
If you run you website on the Apache web server and cPanel as you server control panel, then the solution is simple. Recently, I needed to move my old portfolio website to this new domain without losing my search engine rankings I needed to find a way to do it.
Of course you could go and rewrite your old website’s .htaccess file, which would involving copying and pasting codes that you don’t really understand, but if you want to know the easiest way to permanently redirecting pages, then I suggest doing it through cPanel.
Firstly Log in to cPanel and then go to ‘Redirect’ which is under the Domains heading:
Once you are there find the domain or page you want to redirect. Then type in the new domain or page location you want to redirect to in the ‘redirects to’ box. Check to see that the redirection type is ‘Permanent 301′ NOT ‘Temporary 302′.
Leave the rest of the tick boxes alone and click ‘Add’. You should then get a confirmation page saying the redirection was successfully. On the odd occasion you might get an error message saying a .htaccess file could not be created, but if you try again you should be successful.
There are few things you may need to keep in mind when permanently redirecting pages on root directories.
For example if you want to redirect your homepage at:
http://new-domain.com/
then you would also need to redirect
http://new-domain.com/index.php
This is just in the case somebody goes directly to the index.php file, in which they will go to un-redirected old page. The 301 redirection does not distinguish between the two versions so you would have to redirect both manually.
The same would go for a lower subdirectory like:
http://new-domain.com/pages/news/
Which in this case being the index.html, index.php or whatever the root filename is.
It is important to distinguish that a 301 redirect is not the same as a 302 redirect. A 302 redirect tells search engines and the browser that the page has moved ‘temporarily.’ Your new page will be indexed separately from the old page and you will not get the search engine rankings and traffic that you did for your old page.
What you want to tell Search engines and browsers is that this new page has moved to a new location. Search engines and browsers will ignore the old page and not index it, instead going directly to the new page. In this way you will keep your search engine rankings, considering the content is not significantly different from the old page, but rather just cosmetic changes.
