Great WordPress Plugins: Identifying Another One Of Them Another of the great WordPress plugins that deserves special mention is ""Simple 301 Redirects"". One thing about essential WordPress plugins is that if you do not know about them or do not know how to use them, you do not realize how great a functionality you are leaving out of your content management system. ""Simple 301 Redirects"" is a good example of this. I recollect that I have been in and out of internet marketing three times over the years before this my final stay. Each time I resurfaced on the internet marketing scene, had I known about this great WordPress plugin, no doubt my search engine rankings would be higher today. I simply would have deployed it to transfer my old blog posts to the new amended/updated pages and thereby seamlessly preserved the old pages rankings. But alas, each time I resurfaced on the internet marketing scene, I simply discarded the old blog posts and posted new/updated pages of these old blog posts on my new blog without linking the two. That is one of the many setbacks great WordPress plugins like ""Simple 301 Redirects"" set out to correct. It provides an easy method of redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web. It’s especially handy when you migrate a site to WordPress and can’t preserve your URL structure. By setting up 301 redirects from your old pages to your new pages, any incoming links will be seemlessly passed along, and their pagerank (or what-have-you) will be passed along. Note that ""age"" and ""number and nature of backlinks"" are critical factors in search engine rankings. Any action you therefore take to preserve these for your blog posts will definitely positively impact your search engine rankings. I’ll give you a perfect example here. I wrote a blog post in December 2009. At that time, I still was not as thoroughly grounded as I am now in search engine optimization (SEO) and so was not optimizing effectively for my intended keywords. I recently changed the title and made some minor adjustments to the body of the blog post and were it to be before, I would simply have left it at that. Does it strike a chord in you that anytime you do such and leave it at that you are simply beginning your SEO for that post all over again? All the backlinks to the previous post will be gone forever. So also the age, as the new blog post will now be indexed afresh while the old blog post on subsequent visits by the Google bot will read ""not found"", again compounding your crawl errors in your Google webmaster tools. Note that all these ultimately negatively impact your page rank. So what did I do? I simply inserted my old url in the ""Simple 301 Redirects"" interface and pointed it to my new url which I also inserted in the interface and saved. Just as simple as that and wow! a whole lot has happened with those simple steps. The backlinks and age of my old blog post will be seamlessly passed over to my new blog post and the page rank of my web page preserved. Let me explain another purpose to which you can deploy this plugin that I have identified as one of the great WordPress plugins. If you go into your webmaster tools account, you will see indicated, crawl errors that resulted while the search engines were trying to crawl your web pages. You can rectify some of these errors and thereby have a more ""efficient"" website which will impact positively on your search engine rankings by utilizing this plugin to redirect some incorrectly specified links to their originally intended destination. Those links that you have control over and can still amend such as your backlinks in forums, you can make amends to. But what of incorrectly specified links that you no longer have access to? For example, links on your articles republished on other sites. This is again better explained with an illustration. I erroneously inserted a link in one of my articles which was republished on another site and noticed the error from ""crawl errors"" in my Google webmaster tools account. The link led nowhere i.e. 404 page and I subsequently redirected it to its originally intended destination, thereby preserving that backlink. This becomes very important when you realize that you can have many of such errors over time.The ""Simple 301 Redirects"" plugin’s many uses can only be limited by your imagination. In summary, the ""Simple 301 Redirects"" is one more of the great WordPress plugins.