How to Determine which HTTP Header code to use when moving your website content?

It’s Monday and You are looking at removing a section of your webpages and have decided to move another section of your website to another folder. Now as an SEO, you would know this would be a suicidal move considering how it would affect your search engine rankings on the search engines (If not handled properly). So how can you go about making changes which would have the least impact on your website’s rankings.Step 1 - You need to know what kind of HTTP header to use, 404, 301, 302 or 200. The 2 HTTP headers that you would require for this example, would mainly be 404 - page cannot be found and 301 - permanent redirect.

Step 2 - Now find relevant or related content that is similar to the content that you are going to remove. This way, your users would still be able to find subject related content. Make sure you do a URL mapping of all the new landing pages, as you would be needing them for the redirects later.

Step 3 - Once you have manage to map out all the related pages, you can now set the type of HTTP header each page should have. For those with related content, put the 301 HTTP code and for those without, place 404 HTTP code. This would allow the search engines to know which pages have been permanently moved and which have been deleted and would be removed from the search engine index.

NOte - It is best to conduct a 301 redirect for pages that have been uploaded for sometime, as your pages might have good quality inbound links which you wouldnt want to waste.

Also when you conduct a 301 redirect, you might experience a drop in traffic and rankings as the search engines need time to update their algorithms.

Written by SEO Tipster on August 10th, 2007 with no comments.
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