Confused About Redirects

Tom, you don't need to add anything more. WP will do the heavy lifting for you automatically. Just ensure that you have the addresses correct on the Settings > General page of the Dashboard.

Tom

Redirects can be used for many things and really depends on your situation.

Did you have a website up and running in that domain BEFORE you installed Wordpress? Did it have pages that were ranked in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's)

For best SEO, you want to use the same address all the time when you are building links to your WP site. not www at some place and not www at others.

When you are talking about "domain.com" to "www.domain.com" on your site, this can be set and or changed in the .htaccess file in the root folder.

Here is a sample one for you to look at:
--------------------
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^webyabber.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webyabber.com/$1 [R=301,L]

DirectoryIndex index.htm
--------------------

What this does is takes anyone that enters webyabber.com, rewrites the address to Website Design Denton Texas - SEO Services - Online Marketing - WebYabber.com AND is looking for a file called index.htm in that folder.

When setting up sites for my clients, I sometimes have servers that will not accept the home page being index.php, so I wiret a new .htaccess file like above and change the index.htm to index.php and this solves the problem

If you have an existing site and you want to move the SEO over to a new installation of WP, a 301 redirect is best as this tells the search engines that it is a Permanent Redirect.... This will help shift any links you have over to the new pages and maintain an SEO you have built for them. If you use a Javascript redirect, you do not gain that advantage and more and more the search engines do not like this as they see this as a potentially sneaky way to send the visitor to a different location that what they intended..... Be careful if you use them.

As for the 404 redirect.... I would not do that, I would create a custom 404.htm page that has a navigation bar on it and also a complete sitemap of your site.... This way if the visitor enters a page that they were not supposed to and ends up on the 404 (page not found) page, they get a brief message saying the page was not found or moved (your choice) but also with the sitemap, they can look for exactly what they want to find...

Hope that helps you out.

Have a Great Day!

Richard

If it's a new blog (not indexed yet), just edit Wordpress General Settings else you need to do htaccess edits as Richard Suggested