How to Use 301 Redirect in Blogspot Blogs

301 redirect is one thing that many bloggers have not known and applied on their blogs. One of the things I enjoy from using 301 redirect on my blog is that it gives me the privilege to republish my old posts which no longer do well on search engine results.

Before we continue to the guide on how to use 301 redirect on blogger, I would like to take a little time to tell you about what a 301 redirect is all about.

Read Also:
How to Disable Copy and Paste on Blogger Posts
How to Show Last Modified Dates on Blogger Posts
How to Get Your Adsense Account Approved Easily

What is 301 Redirect?

 301 redirect is a permanent redirection of a webpage to a new url. This is the best way to point all traffic generated by the old link to the new url. Google said in a post about 301 redirect;

“If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommend that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location.”

One good thing about this is that it passes a link juice from the redirected page to the new page which is very good for getting a good rank.

Dangers of Neglecting 301 Redirect in Some circumstances

I started blogging at a time that I had no knowledge of SEO practices. I wrote so many posts that I didn’t optimize for search engine presence; No KEYWORD targeting, URLs off-topic and so many other poor SEO practices. These posts all got indexed by search engines but never made it far. They got lost at the tail end of my blog. So many of these posts are still very valid with lots of information that I still want to publish now that I have a better sense of the need for optimizing my posts.

At first I said, why worry yourself? Just copy the contents from the old post to a new post and delete the old one. I did that for about 3 posts but the results were not so encouraging. The old posts were already indexed and I was still seeing them on Google even though they no longer exist. after sometimes, I started having the problem of content duplication which really had a negative effect on my blog. I started asking Google to unindex my old  posts as they no longer exist but no help came through. So, I started looking for solutions to the problem and behold, the solution was 301 redirect. 301 redirect did not only tell readers and crawlers that my old links have been moved permanently to a new url, it also passed a much needed link juice to my new post and made them to rank well. After this experience and findings, I decided to write a post on 301 redirect and how to implement it on blogger blog since most of the things I write on my blogging niche are the things that I have learned in the course of blogging and implement on my blog at one time or the other.

Note that if you need to redirect links from a different domain to a link in another domain name, it is best to use a canonical tag.

Now that I have shared my experience with you, it is time to go ahead with the topic of the day.

How to Use 301 Redirect on Blogger

This is very simple. Whenever you need to republish your old blogger posts, move a post to a new url, merge posts or have other reasons to change the url of an existing post, follow the steps below to implement 301 redirect on Blogger to avoid the problem of content duplication.

Step 1: Login to your Blogger Account and go to your Dashboard.

Step 2: Go to Setting and then go to Search Preference.

Step 3: Locate “Custom Redirect” and Click on “Edit” in front of it.

Step 4: Edit the two link boxes provided as shown in the image below;

Step 5:  Select “From” and “Permanent” check boxes and hit “Save” button.

Note: You can add as many redirection as you like.

It is that easy. Use the comment box below for clarification if you find any portion of this post confusing.