Purpose or need of URL redirection
By arin2u | September 23, 2007
Topics: Tech Talks |
Today one of my friend knocked me and informed that he is very happy to get one referral link to his new website but when he types the url of page (from where he got the link) and presses return/enter key, he finds that the page url changes from http://www.example.com/ to http://www.example.com/root/home/. He was shocked to notice the unexpected change in the url. My friends, this is simply an url redirection.
He raise the question
why webmasters uses URL redirection
Possible reasons
Human Error: A trend is observed that people tend to forget big domain names and often end up in typing the wrong one. They also make typing mistake. So taking into consideration the human forgetfulness and error, often webmasters use short/simpler form of urls for redirection to the original url of the website, thus keeping the website traffic.
Moving a site to a new domain: If a webmaster wants to change his domain name say for specific business reason, he can use url redirection to keep his visitors in his website. It is quite possible that his website has got many incoming links from other websites or many people have bookmarked his websites. So he will set a redirection to his new url without loosing visitors. Search engines with also detect the new url.
To balance Traffic load or bandwidth usage: Webmasters often redirect url to a less traffic site in order to reduce the traffic load or website bandwidth usage of the existing high traffic site.
Search engine manipulation: Webmasters try to show popular search terms on page to search engines but redirect their website visitors to a different page. They often try to steal the page rank of one page and use it on the redirected page.
N.B.: Search engines now a days become smarter to identify such manipulations and take necessary actions (reduce ranks or ban) with the websites that employ such techniques.
Technical needs: Web tech guys use descriptive parameters in the urls like session information, transaction route etc for running applications properly. That’s why you may notice that the url is getting changed keeping the content same.
These are the reasons why webmasters use url redirection. I mailed all the above reason to him. Hope he’ll be satisfied. Do you like this info?
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This is Arindam aka arin2u. I love blogging and I do it in simple ways. I like learning new things. SEO, internet marketing are my niche fields.
This section is great. You have written it in such a way that even a blind person can understand many things. Carry on with more topics so that the freshers can easily understand and at the end I will request you to publish all the tutorials in the form of a book.
First of all,i would like to thank you for referring the referral link information.
Your blog gave us the right direction, on why webmasters uses URL redirection.
It’s an informative post indeed…Your blog is really a Knowledge Bank for SEO guy.
Nice post. Will have to watch this blog for sure in future for some great information. Keep posting regularly.
First of all let me tell you this is a great post.
URL redirection is not a good practice if its done for Search Engine Manipulation. But if there is some kind of technical needs or if you are moving a site to new domain then there is no problem in this.
But remember its important that the hhtp header you pass in this redirection is 301 Permanent Redirect
Great Going Arindam da!!
Thank you everyone for this tremendous encouragement. I’m loving blogs and blogging. Thanks Anirudh, 301 and 302 and Search engines - that’s the next topic I’m planning to write about.
Thank you for your input on this topic and most importantly it’s written in such a lucid style that even a novice person who is layman on these terms will be able to understand the motive of this topic..Keep on writing such articles so that we can increase our knowledge base
Thanks Arindam da this blog post will be a great help to me and other IMA’s new to link exchange. Looking forward to further guidance from you on such matters.