One of the biggest factors the search engines use when determining your ranking is trust. Google is more inclined to trust a site that has been in existence for a while and that has many incoming links to it. Often, when rebuilding a site, you end up changing the URLs of your web pages. The problem is though that these new URLs don’t have the trust that the old URLs do, even if a lot of the content is the same.
When you take your established content and place it somewhere else, you are effectively resetting the clock on when that content was created and breaking all of the inbound links that pointed to it.
How can you re-establish this trust with the search engines?
The most effective way to tell the search engines that you’ve moved your content is through the 301 redirect. By setting up 301 redirects for your content, you show search engines where your content has moved from, and your inbound links will now direct to your new pages.
