Room Escape Artist

^{Well-researched, rational, and reasonably humorous.}

The Most Important Thing Your Website Designer Never Told You: 301 Redirect

We implore you: use 301 redirects!

25 December 2023

3–4 minutes

You’re going to change the structure of your website. It’s inevitable. You’ll take down pages. You’ll reorganize and rename pages.

A 301 redirect is the permanent redirection of one url to another. It points the old url at the new one. Here’s more information on 301 redirects.

This matters so that people don’t get lost, and, more importantly, search engines don’t turn up nothing. They don’t like that. You lose internet points. (That’s SEO stuff.)

Also, your reviewers don’t like it. We linked to your website, giving you those coveted internet points and now our link goes nowhere. We lose internet points unless we fix it. So we stop linking to you.

Flex tape meme: Top panel, water spewing out of a hole in a vat. Text reads, "Youri Internet Points." Bottom panel, a hand covering the hole with black tape. Text reads, "301 Redirect."

Examples!

If you do any of these things that change your url, you need a 301 redirect:

You restructure with a category in the url: Company.com/game >> Company.com/games/game1
You rename a game: Company.com/game >> Company.com/newgame
You close a game and open up a sequel: Company.com/game1 >> Company.com/game2
You close a game for good (just redirect to the homepage): Company.com/game1 >> Company.com
You accidentally publish a stupid url: Company.com/s=1 >> Company.com

Thank you!

It’s link checker week over at Room Escape Artist. It’s a good end of year project… if by good, we mean annoying and time consuming. In truth, it’s utterly miserable. We’ve spent hours fixing dead links without 301 redirects.

Thank you to our Patreon backers. Your support and your wonderful chatter in our Patreon channel keep us in high spirits through the monotonous link updating.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Cameron Wardell, Elizabeth Griffin, Black Crow Productions, Jeremy Greenfield, Emily Bernard, Dynizzle, and Laura Burkart.

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Written by

Lisa Spira

Editor-In-Chief at Room Escape Artist: Whether she is editing REA’s content, leading the Hivemind, or wrangling the logistics for RECON or the Escape, Immerse, Explore Tours, Lisa is the reason that everything runs like clockwork. As a linguist and data expert, Lisa also leads our Industry Data efforts and is responsible for our annual Industry Reports. Lisa is the heart of REA and also bakes all of our escakes.