What is the best way to redirect a URL without losing SEO traffic or value?

[makoo]

What is the best way to redirect a URL without losing SEO traffic or value?

[dennis123]

Hi Friend,
The best way, especially if you are re-branding your site and/or moving to a new URL, is to use a 301 redirect. Although 301's don't pass 100% link juice or page authority, you shouldn't lose a significant amount of traffic. If you have a large Ecommerce site with a lot of potential duplicate content, then the rel=canonical tag can be used to suggest to SE bots to index only the preferred version of the product page or content (you can eliminate dupes such as pagination, alpha sorts, etc). A word of caution about the rel=canonical: there's been some indication that only Google honors this tag contrary to public statements made by Bing. Also, there seems to be widespread problems or even faulty implementation of this tag by webmasters.

[jayam]

Step 1 (due diligence): Make sure the destination domain has a clean past. ...
Step 2: Review existing backlinks and search performance. ...
Step 3: Migrate the site.

[james.02192]

Go with permanent redirect!

[jayammrg]

Well, it depends, but in most cases, no. Redirects are not bad for SEO, but — as with so many things — only if you put them in place correctly. A bad implementation might cause all kinds of trouble, from loss of PageRank to loss of traffic. Redirecting pages is a must if you make any changes to your URLs.

[chandrao7]

The easiest way to redirect a URL is by using your hosting provider's control panel. ...
Take note that the redirect above uses the 302 redirect type, as stated on the hPanel. ...
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. ...
This redirect is good for SEO since you can keep the search ranking of the old domain.