Redirects are a way of sending the people and search engines to a different URL from the one they initially requested. In easy words, it’s like mail forwarding from your old address to your new address. You have to forward letters so that you won’t miss any valuable messages.
301 redirects, is a permanent redirect from past URL to new. It transfers between 90-99% of link juice and ranking capability to the redirected page. Besides, not setting up 301 redirects on the pages you moved or deleted can result in a drop in rankings, it’s like literally committing SEO suicide.
Search engines decipher 301 redirects that former page has a better version of it and can be found at the new URL. Here is an illustration from MOZ.
Reasons why you should NOT set up 301 redirects:
- You want your rankings decline
- You want to waste all your past SEO works
- You want to lose massive traffic
- You want to confuse visitors and search engines
- You want to lose potential customer
- You want your visitors to have bad user experience
Reasons why you should set up 301 redirects:
- To keep the traffic/rankings, you have been making before new website redesign
- To associate standard web conventions such as HTTP:// and www., with one URL to maximize domain right
- To rebrand or rename a site with another URL
- To direct traffic to a website from different URLs owned by similar organization
- To wash up dynamic URLs and redirect them to shorter search engine friendly variants
On the side note, be informed that when transferring a page from one URL to another, the search engines will take some time to realize the 301 redirect and acknowledge the new page as the antecedent.
