301 Redirects

301 Redirects notify browsers and search engines that a page on your website has moved to a new location. 301 Redirects serve as a permanent forwarding address for old URLs.

301 Redirects are created automatically by Good Gallery when Permanent Links change for pages, images, and tags.

Creating a 301 Redirect is like submitting a change of address card to the post office to ensure that your postal mail is forwarded correctly after you move.

If you are moving from an old website to a new Good Gallery website, you should consider creating 301 Redirects.

Benefits

There are several benefits to adding 301 Redirects:

If pages on your old site were ranking well for important keyword phrases, then a 301 Redirect will ensure that those ranking factor benefits pass through to the new URL.
When visitors arrive at an old URL via a search engine result or bookmark, they are automatically redirected to the new page location.
When search engines recrawl URLs, they are automatically notified of the new page URL. With 301 Redirects, search engines will update their index more rapidly than if you do not provide 301 Redirects.

Alternatives

Although many websites will benefit from adding 301 Redirects, if your site is not already popular with search engines, skipping the creation of 301 Redirects may not be harmful to your brand.

Search engines will eventually find the new pages on your website even if you do not create 301 Redirects.
If you do not create 301 Redirects, visitors who arrive at a missing page via a search engine result or bookmark are presented with a "404 Not Found" error page and encouraged to visit your home page.
Google Search Console may report missing URLs in their Crawl Errors report. However, your SEO is not impacted by missing URLs in your Crawl Errors report.
Search engines do not penalize sites for not having 301 Redirects. Search engines also do not penalize sites where 404 Errors are present.

Other Considerations

There are several issues to consider when working with 301 Redirects:

If a URL on your old site and your new site is the same, you do not need to create a 301 Redirect for that page.
You should create your 301 Redirects list before you Go Live with your new site. Once your new site is live, you may not have access to the URLs from your old website.
If you do not create 301 Redirects before you go live and decide to add them later, you can do that. However, you may lose the benefit of letting Google know about the new page.
If a page on your old site does not have a corresponding page on your new site, you do not need to create a 301 Redirect for that page unless the old page is heavily trafficked.
Using 301 Redirects to send visitors and search engines to home pages is not recommended. Instead, forward visitors and search engines to similar content or allow the page to Error 404.
After you save your 301 Redirect list in Good Gallery, test the old URLs before you Go Live to make sure that the old URL redirects to the new URL.

Create Redirect List

Follow these steps to create 301 Redirects for your website:

Open a new document in any third-party text editor.
Visit a page on your old website.
Copy the full URL from the browser address bar.
```
http://www.example.com/aboutme/
```
Paste or enter the appropriate information.
Press ENTER to add a line break.
Repeat steps 2 through 5, adding every page from your old website.
Add a comma (,) after each URL on your list.
```
http://www.example.com/aboutme/,
```
Find the corresponding page on your new Good Gallery website.
Copy the full URL of the corresponding Good Gallery page.
```
https://example.goodgallery.com/about-me
```

Paste or enter the new URL on the same line as the old URL.

http://www.example.com/aboutme,https://example.goodgallery.com/about-me

Repeat steps 8 through 10 for all pages.
Activate the Search & Replace tool in your text editor.
Remove the http://www.example.com and https://example.goodgallery.com text.
Sign In to your Good Gallery administrator account.
Hover your cursor over the Site menu.
Under the Your Settings menu heading, choose Site Options.
Edit the 301 Redirects setting.
Paste or enter the appropriate information.
Click the Save Changes button.

Supplemental

Here is a 301 Redirect list example:

/about.html,/about-me
/photos/weddings,/portfolio/wedding
/more-info.html,/contact
/image1,/weddings/los-angeles-wedding
/image?55,/galleries/portraits/new-york-portrait

The format is: OLDURL,NEWURL

To create a 301 Redirect from any previous URL to your home page, the entry will include the old URL and a forward slash only after the comma:

/oldgallery/photo247,/

You can create 301 Redirects that combine URLs from multiple sites. To address this in your 301 Redirect list, include the full domain path of the originating domain:

https://www.example.com/aboutme,/about-me

You can also create 301 Redirects that point to other domains or pages on other domains:

/example,https://www.amazon.com

Note: You cannot include a number sign (#) in your old URL. The number sign is a URL fragment that typically links to a page bookmark, and servers do not recognize a # sign as a valid URL path.

Wildcard Redirects

Good Gallery supports the use of wildcard characters in 301 redirect lists. A wildcard is a character that will match any other character or sequence of characters.

If you use the wildcard character at the end of URLs in your old URL list, all matching traffic is sent to a single new URL:

/gallery1/*,/favorite-photos

You can use a wildcard at the end of a URL in your old URL list AND at the end of a URL in your new URL list to redirect to a set of new URLs:

/journal/*,/blog/*

Redirects for Blogs

If your old WordPress blog resided on the root of your domain or in any subdirectory other than the /blog subdirectory, then you can create 301 Redirects using the steps outlined above.

If your old blog resided in the /blog subdirectory and you have migrated that blog from your old website to Good Gallery, then you may not need to create redirects as the URL to your posts and pages should remain the same.

If your old blog resided in the /blog subdirectory and you need to make changes to the URLs of posts that have /blog in the path, then you need to add those 301 Redirects using a WordPress plugin. The Good Gallery 301 Redirects setting does not support paths that include /blog.

If you had a blog in the /blog subdirectory and you no longer want a blog, you will still need to install WordPress alongside Good Gallery and then add those 301 Redirects using a WordPress plugin. In other words, 301 Redirects with /blog in the path must be handled via WordPress.

The most popular plugin used by many Good Gallery customers to manage those redirects is Simple 301 Redirects.

Automatic Redirects

Good Gallery includes an innovative feature that automatically creates 301 Redirects. The 301 Redirect change occurs when a Permanent Link is changed. The Permanent Link field indicates the page URL.

When the Permanent Link field is changed, Good Gallery keeps track of that change and automatically creates a 301 Redirect record for the old URL. Those 301 Redirects are then displayed in the 301 Redirects field in Page Settings, Image Settings, or Tag Settings.

301 Redirects

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