PHP 301 Redirect Permanently

There are times when you may want to redirect a webpage to a particular URL permanently, this is called a 301 redirect in HTTP request/response protocol. It is also a very important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that your redirect is correct. 301 redirects are called as Search Engine Friendly redirects. When the bots/crawlers read the URL they know that the page has been permanently moved to a new location. Let's see a code snippet for the same,

<?php 
//set the 301 header
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 

//Set the url location to the redirected page
header("Location: http://redirected-page-url.com"); 
?>

Note: If you remove the first header line the page will be redirected to the specified new location but it would be a 302 Moved Temporarily kind of redirect and not 301.

<?php 

//This will result to 302 : Moved Temporarily redirect (should be avoided)
header("Location: http://redirected-page-url.com"); 
?>

If you read Google's Webmaster Guidelines you would see that they recommend using 301 redirects instead of 302.

"If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommend that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location."

- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en