Why is redirection important?
Why is Redirection so Important?
Redirection is a way to drive visitors and search engines from one URL to another. This is very useful if you are moving content to a new URL, deleting pages, changing domain names or merging sites.
In the context of dotRadio, it can be interesting and sometimes even vital to implement such redirections. For instance, it will allow you to not lose your usual visitors when migrating to a .radio domain, or it could also bring you more traffic if you plan to keep your legacy domain in addition to a .radio domain.
When you want to start using redirection, be sure to follow these tips:
- Avoid chain redirections: a redirection should not lead to another redirection link.
- Do a redirection to a preferred version of the site, with the correct protocol (http or https), domain name (with or without www) and path (with or without a slash).
What is redirection?
It is a way to drive your visitors and search engines to a different URL than the URL they requested. Redirections play an important role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so it’s important to know what types of redirections exist, when to use them and how to compare them.
Redirections are important for both your visitors and search engines when content has been moved.
Visitors
It is in your interest to offer your visitors a pleasant experience on your site. When searching for content previously available on your site, it is better that they do not land on a 404 error page but rather on another URL.
Search engines
Search engines need to understand that content has been moved. By doing this, you can communicate to them how you want to see your site crawled and indexed. This is an important factor in your SEO performance.
Here is an example:
Let’s say you have a YourRadioName.com and you just bought a brand-new domain name called YourStationName.Radio. When people search for “YourStationName”, you want them to be redirected to https://www.YourStationName.radio which is different from the old one https://www.YourStationName.com.
In this case, you will have to create a redirection in order to make search engines remember https://www.YourRadioName.com moved to https://www.YourRadioName.Radio
When should redirects be used?
When pages are deleted
When domain names are changed
When sites are merged
How it works if you have a DotRadio domain
Website redirection
If you purchased a DotRadio domain name (on register.radio) such as www.YourRadioName.radio, we implemented a redirection option in your account and domain settings.
Thus, it is super easy for you to create a redirection from your website to your DotRadio website.
Owning a DotRadio top level domain allows you to redirect your domain to your personal website or Facebook page or any other link you would like to redirect to.
For example if you want your DotRadio domain to display your website, you can easily set this up in your account profile in the register.radio back end.
Example: your main website is called www.rebeats.com and you just bought www.rebeats.radio. To improve your SEO and make it easier for your viewers to go on your website, it is better that both URLs land on the same page.
With your account you can redirect people who search www.reveats.radio to www.rebeats.com simply by adding the URL on your account page.
In your account page in the menu “manage domain”, choose the tab “redirection”. As you can see here, I can redirect my domain. So here the domain is simon-morice-media.radio. If we want people to be redirected to my website, we would enter below the URL address. Here we put: www.YourSiteName.com.
Once you have applied that, any time people input www.YourSiteName.radio in the browser, they will land on www.YourSiteName.com.
Redirect to other URLs
You can also CREATE a landing page and redirect it with this tool:
Located in the same place as the domain redirection, you can create up to ten subdomains.
What is a subdomain?
A subdomain is a domain that you created yourself to make it easier for people to go to some link.
Example:
Your radio name is Rebeats.
You have a DotRadio domain called www.Rebeats.radio
You have a Facebook page called “Greatbeats”.
It is hard for people that know you through your radio to find your Facebook page since it doesn’t have the same name.
With our subdomain solution you can easily create a Facebook domain that redirects straight to your Facebook page.
For example, you create : www.facebook.rebeats.radio
Destination URL : www.facebook.com/Greatbeats
This way, people can land on your Facebook page when you display your DotRadio domain name.
And you can do that for nine more URLs (LinkedIn, Twitter, website, stream, live, YouTube, etc.).
What if you want to go from .com to .radio?
If you own a .com domain and you would like people to land on a .radio domain instead because it is more understandable, then you just have to do the exact same process on the server side.
With server-side redirection, the server sends a 3xx HTTP status code when a visitor requests a URL. The server determines to which URL the visitors and search engines should be sent.
If you move permanently your content, then you should use a 301 redirection.
301 redirection: Permanently moved
What is a 301 redirection?
A 301 redirection is a server-side redirection that drive users from an “A” URL to a “B” URL, while notifying search engines that the contents of URL “A” have been permanently moved to URL “B”.
When it comes to redirection, the 301 is usually your best choice. It’s worth noting that the browsers will often be 301 redirections because of their permanent nature, so keep it in mind when dealing with redirections.
The role of 301 redirection in SEO
It is generally considered that a 301 redirection transfers from 90% to 95% of the authority of the page from an old URL to a new one. While a visitor will not notice the difference between a 301 redirection and any other redirection, for a search engine, it is a completely different signal.
What about a 302 redirect?
Whereas a 301 redirect is a permanent relocation of your URL, a 302 redirect is a temporary change that redirects both users and search engines to the desired new location for a limited amount of time, until the redirect is removed.
A 302 redirect is much easier to do, as it can be done using a meta tag or in JavaScript, rather than requiring the webmaster to access server files and spending the additional time necessary to create a 301 redirect.
Using a 302 redirect when you should have used a 301 redirect becomes an issue when search engines try to determine which page is of higher value. It is likely that the search engine will only list one version of the page in its search engine results, meaning the wrong page could wind up being the one that gets listed. This problem will compound over time in the event of more and more redirections.
On the top lane, you can see what really happens.
On the bottom lane, you can see what the user sees.
Now here is an Exemple with one of our DotRadio user: Hot.radio.
They use tohave only a DotCom website called wearehotradio.com and they decided to choose DotRadio because it make more sense for them so now they have hot.radio as well.
They wanted to keep both domain and they established a redirection from wearehotradio.com to hot.radio. So now, either you click on wearehotradio.com or hot.radio, they will both take you to the same page: hot.radio.
Do the test yourself:
you can click on wearehotradio.com to check what your users will experience in case they have bookmarked your legacy url.
Hot.radio web page
Conclusion
At this point we hope redirection is becoming really clear for you.
On paper it might seem complicated, but if you use our tool for redirecting, in three clicks it will be set up!
What you must remember from this article is this:
- If you have a new domain name, use redirection
- Redirection helps SEO
- Redirection helps your visitors
- .Com toward .Radio, use 301 redirection from your server
- .Radio toward .Com, use our redirection tool.
If you have a DotRadio domain name, we encourage you to learn about redirections for your radio station. If you don’t have a DotRadio domain name yet, feel free to check out our website for more information about owning one.
In both cases, we will be happy to answer any questions you may have about redirection.
The DotRadio Team
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