December 10, 2021 / ClickMeter

301 redirect for SEO

All link tracking services, including ClickMeter, track clicks on your links through URL redirection – which is also known as URL forwarding. But you may be worried about PageRank dilution as many redirect techniques – 302, meta refresh, etc. – decrease your link power in search engines, particularly Google.

The best SEO practice for URL redirection is a server-side 301 redirect, as recommended by Google experts: “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.”

Google also says: “301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances … [when] people access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your homepage can be reached in multiple ways – for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com – it’s a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL.”

As a matter of fact, 301 redirects and a normal link pass on the same amount of ‘power’. You can use a 301 redirect for SEO as there is no extra dilution of PageRank when compared to a regular link.

You can find out more by checking out the below video from Google Webmasters:

ClickMeter offers you the possibility to create tracking links that redirect through 301. That is why many expert SEO marketers use our tracking service.

Related Reading:

This blog post is about:

301 redirect for SEO
Server-side 301 redirect
PageRank dilution
301 redirect and PageRank optimization

Originally published: August 2nd, 2017.
Updated: December 03rd, 2021.