A 301 redirect automatically causes one URL to redirect to another and tells the Web (and search engines) that this redirect is permanent.
These can be used to direct one domain to another.
Example.
A company may want to protect its brand and register the following domains
mybusiness.com, mybusiness.net and mybusiness.info
However, the business would not want to duplicate the content across 3 separate sites so it would build 1 website “mybusiness.com” for example and then create 301 redirects from the other 2.
Then when a user types in either mybusiness.net or mybusiness.info they would automatically be re-directed to mybuisness.com.
301 redirects are also frequently used to mask affiliate links.
A 301 Redirect tells Search Engines in effect to delete the old URL from its index and move any of its rank value to the new URL.
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