{"id":345,"date":"2019-03-28T09:08:56","date_gmt":"2019-03-28T13:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webdev.cedarville.edu\/blog\/?p=345"},"modified":"2019-06-07T08:30:26","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T12:30:26","slug":"how-we-increased-serp-rank-with-strong-seo-and-a-301-redirect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webdev.cedarville.edu\/blog\/2019\/how-we-increased-serp-rank-with-strong-seo-and-a-301-redirect\/","title":{"rendered":"How We Increased SERP Rank with Strong SEO and a 301 Redirect"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In an earlier post, I explained <\/span>how we landed a featured snippet<\/span><\/a> for our most popular Microsoft Office help page – even though we totally ignored SEO best practices. Google felt it was worthy of position 0 in spite of terrible SEO because it answered the search queries better than any other page<\/em>. In this post, I’ll explain what happened when a new version of another popular help page was created, and a 301 (permanent) redirect was added to the original page. We wanted to see what effect updating the page with correct and meaningful SEO techniques would have on Google search rank. If there was a significant bump in page rank, then other popular IT-related help pages would also be addressed.<\/span><\/p>\n

About 301 Redirects<\/h2>\n

A 301 redirect tells both browsers and search engine bots that a page has been permanently moved. Search engines understand this to mean the page content can be found at the new URL. Since the original page was so popular, we didn’t want to lose page rank. Using a 301 redirect minimizes or eliminates any potential loss. According to a Moz.com post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why Recreate the Page?<\/h2>\n

You might be asking yourself, “If the page is ranking so well already, why bother recreating it? Why not just update the SEO on the existing page?”<\/em> We had a few reasons to recreate the page:<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. The help pages are being moved to a different platform and are slated for removal from the website. If we don’t recreate the pages, we will lose valuable site traffic.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. To add a small internal promotion box asking visitors to explore our university for their other needs.<\/li>\n
  3. To see if we could snag the featured snippet for this page as well.<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Most importantly, to establish our website as a valuable source of information available to anyone, not just our students.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The page selected was the 5th most-visited of our IT-related help pages. It was the 18th most popular page on our entire website over all for the 2018 calendar year (Jan. – Dec.). This particular page describes the steps necessary to insert the document path name into the header or footer of a Microsoft Word document<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Changes to the New Page<\/h2>\n

    We kept the new page as close to the original as possible (to keep the focus on SEO), but we did make a few adjustments:<\/span><\/p>\n