Benefit of Weebly 301 Redirects
April 10, 2012 Tags: SEO, seo tips, Weebly 301 Redirect
Category: Articles, SEO, Site Management 18 Comments 
A typical 301 Redirect’s job is to take a visitor from an old URL (web address) to a new URL.
Page names change. URLs change. 301 redirect is a way of automatically forwarding a user from old page to the new page. There are several instances where a 301 Redirect is necessary for a site.
Weebly now provides option to configure 301 Redirects for web sites. In this topic, we will show you how you can put the 301 Redirects to proper use for your situation.
Note that the Weebly 301 Redirects are limited to redirecting a link to one of local pages of your site only. Redirecting to external pages is not allowed. So, this redirect does not help you if you wish to migrate to a different host for hosting your site.
It greatly helps the site administrators with retaining the critical audience. Visitors could have bookmarked your old site address. Search engines may be showing your old link. Backlinks from other sites pointing to your site which play a key role with building your site’s reputation could be using old links to your site.
Without the Redirect option, you would risk losing the traffic and the SERP rank. Now that Weebly has provided the choice of redirecting, don’t just rename your page. It is better to create a new page and redirect the old page to the new one.
And here is another big advantage of the Redirects. What if you are running a special promotion and would like your site’s visitors to be taken to that special page ? Now you can set your home page (index.html) redirect to your special page. Follow these simple steps and you will have the liberty of assigning any page as your landing page:
Step 1: Create a hidden dummy page (say Landing) and move it to the top of your list of pages under the ‘Pages’ tab. You need this step to preserve the integrity of your menu navigation.
Step 2: Add a Redirect by Settings -> SEO -> 301 Redirects with Old URL as “/index.html” and choose that special page as the destination.
From now onwards, every visitor coming to yoursite.weebly.com will be automatically taken to your special page. Be wary of SEO implications if using index.html to redirect to an internal page. Do not remove the “index.html” redirect when you are done with the special promotion. Instead, redirect it to the Home page. This will ensure that your home.html does not change and gets to keep its rank.
When I try this, I get the error message – “You cannot redirect /index.html”
Any ideas?
Weebly seems to have disabled the redirect for index.html. It worked perfectly fine when I tried it couple of days ago. Don’t know what made them to block this.
It’s an important feature for more advanced users and makes Weebly now one of the most SEO-friendly website builders. Thanks for the tutorial!
Does this only work with pages within weebly? Suppose I have a domain site that is getting traffic and I move it to weebly but am unable to recreate the url structure, can I set up the 301 redirect so that when traffic comes from a link to a page that does not exist on weebly it will go to weebly page instead?
Yes. You can redirect you old url structure to a weebly page. For instance say your old url is
When you move to Weebly, let’s say you want the old url to go to a page
You can configure 301 redirect to do this. Create a redirect with the structure and select the page the traffic should go to.
Can I use the 301 redirect on Weebly to enable me to use multiple domain names for my site in a search engine friendly way? And, if yes, how should I go about it?
Unfortunately, Weebly’s 301 Redirect can be used to redirect to a page in the same site. It can not be used to redirect to an external URL.
For example, I tagged some of my posts as “DIY”& I want all those”diy”-tagged posts to have their own page in my blog that can be seen in my navbar. Can I use this 301 redirect? if so, then how?
“301 redirect” is to redirect a url. If the tagged posts showup in the exact same url all the time, you should be able to redirect it. Show a practical example. That would be better.
hi,
why is that i can’t redirect the http://www.xyz.com/index.html to http://www.xyz.com ?
I mean index.html to home page directly. Why is not possible ?
is there any solution to this as its very important. Any solutions?
Redirecting index.html is blocked in Weebly (must be conflicting with some functionality internally).
On the other hand, the url home and index.html are the same. They do not need any further redirection.
May be if you explain what you are trying to accomplish (or) what you are trying to address, then we may be able suggest alternatives.
Well its very clear that i don’t want search engines to detect 2 urls
1) http://www.xyz.com/index.html and http://www.xyz.com
i want only 1 url that is http://www.xyz.com
2) There is another issue too. What about the non www and www ? Is there any solutions for that
So i would like weebly to find solutions for the above issues.
There are 2 problems
1) http://www.xyz.com/index.html and http://www.xyz.com so 2 urls actually which does cause duplication in search engines. So can’t this be solved ?
2) the main issue of non www and www redirection ? how to do this one? can anyone suggest?
The Sitemap would include only the index.html
www would be 301 redirect already. There is no SEO issue there. Did you see any warnings popping from Google Webmaster tools ?
Hello,
If I created a sub domain. Can I redirect the page from the main domain to the page in the sub domain ?
Thank you
Weebly 301 redirect is configured to be redirected to one of the pages of the site only. It can not be redirected to an external source. The main domain and subdomain would be two different sites and hence can’t be redirected.
Is there any way to redirect a link to a file instead of a page?
Hello,
I tested a dozen of sites before going live, unfortunatly i did not uncheck the “block search engine” box in “settings” as I did not know it was there (by the way stupid to uncheck it by default).
Now my test sites are indexed by Google, including those that I deleted…
I want to redirect them to my new site before deleting them but the root url redirect does not work, it is not clear if I should write in the left bos of 301 redirect parameters the full url with http://xxx.weebly.com/index.html or http://xxx.weebly.com or xxx.weebly.com/index.html or I dont know what. I cannot manage anything to work.
I know Raju said that home url is blocked but that is not acceptable
Client Javascript does not seem an option as it seems is not crowled ?
Is there a solution to get a redirection instead of the message “Site not Published” for deleted sites ? or anyway for my old still living testing sites ? As I want to get back my ranks and not to bother the crawler…
Thank you