Redirecting a website or webpage can be important for a number of reasons, site redesign, change of domain name, business rebranding etc.

As far as the search engines are concerned there should only ever be one form of redirect, and that is via the “301″ method. Any other form of redirect is considered bad form and will most likely cause all sorts of issues in search results.

The way you actually carry out a 301 redirect depends on the server you have (either windows or Linux) and the type of redirect you need.

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It is very important from both a web design and an SEO point of view that any website you create should display as fast as possible, giving the user the best experience and catering for those with slower internet connections.

There are quite a number of changes you can make in order for a website to run at it’s fastest and I will try and cover the easiest and most effective here. Before we get started, the most effective tools I have found to measure and improve the performance of a website are 2 plugins for Firebug, which is itself a plugin for Firefox. The plugins are Page Speed, created by Google and YSlow, created by Yahoo. Both are open source and provide excellent information. Watch out for Firebug though as it can slow down Firefox, my advice is only run it when you actually need it and have it disabled the rest of the time.

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In an update to the previous post, Google’s Matt Cutts has finally answered commented on the question asked back in July:

“Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June?”

You can see his video over at the Google Webmaster central video channel, but it may be difficult to spot as it actually answers a completely different question:

“Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs?”

This has caused a backlash by many in the SEO industry, so much so that Matt Cutts actually posted an article on his blog “More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results” , unfortunately it still doesn’t answer the question, or explain why Google UK results are so poor. It’s not confined just to UK search either though, other countries are seeing this invasion of poor irrelevant results.

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