Rules of redirection for site migrations
Correctly redirecting your URLs is one of the most important things you can do to make a site migration go smoothly, but there are clear processes to follow if you want to get it right. Those are all situations that we've encountered issues with. So now that we kind of know what we're talking about with migrations and why they kind of sometimes still happen, we're going to launch into some rules that will hopefully help prevent site migration errors because of failed redirects.
1. Create one-to-one redirects
It could save us tons of time if we just use a wildcard and redirect all of these pages to the homepage or to the blog homepage or something like that. But what that tells Google is that Page A has moved to Page B, whereas that's not the case. You're not moving all of these pages to the homepage. They haven't actually moved there. So it's an irrelevant redirect, and Google has even said, we think, that they treat those essentially as a soft 404. They don't even count. So make sure you don't do that. Make sure you're always linking URL to its new location, one-to-one every single time for every URL that's moving.
2. For redirect chains
We think Google says something oddly specific, like watch out for redirect chains, three, no more than five. Just try to limit it as much as possible. By chains, we mean you have URL A, and then you redirect it to B, and then later you decide to move it to a third location. Instead of doing this and going through a middleman, A to B to C, shorten it if you can. Go straight from the source to the destination, A to C.
3. For loops
Similarly what can happen is you redirect position A to URL B to another version C and then back to A. What happens is it's chasing its tail. It will never resolve, so you're redirecting it in a loop. So watch out for things like that. One way to check those things we think is a nifty tool, Screaming Frog has a redirect chains report. So you can see if you're kind of encountering any of those issues after you've implemented your redirects.
4. 404 strategically
The presence of 404s on your site alone, that is not going to hurt your site's rankings. It is letting pages die that were ranking and bringing your site traffic that is going to cause issues. Obviously, if a page is 404ing, eventually Google is going to take that out of the index if you don't redirect it to its new location. If that page was ranking really well, if it was bringing your site traffic, you're going to lose the benefits of it. If it had links to it, you're going to lose the benefits of that backlink if it dies.
So if you're going to 404, just do it strategically. You can let pages die. Like in these situations, maybe you're just outright deleting a page and it has no new location, nothing relevant to redirect it to. That's okay. Just know that you're going to lose any of the benefits that URL was bringing your site.
5. Prioritize "SEO valuable" URLs
When we're down to the wire, we think it's really important to at least have started out with your most important URLs. So those are URLs that are ranking really well, giving you a lot of good traffic, URLs that you've earned links to. So those really SEO valuable URLs, if you have a deadline and you don't get to finish all of your redirects before this project goes live, at least you have those most critical, most important URLs handled first.
6. Test
There are plenty of other ways you can test and find errors. But the most important thing to remember is just to do it, just to test and make sure that even once you've implemented these things, that you're checking and making sure that there are no issues after a launch. We would check right after a launch and then a couple of days later, and then just kind of taper off until you're absolutely positive that everything has gone smoothly.
Courtesy & Copyright
https://creativesaints.com/
http://graphicwebdesign.in/
https://www.papeel.com.br/
https://moz.com/blog/target-multiple-keywords-next-level
https://moz.com/blog/make-or-break-your-site-migration
https://moz.com/blog?page=44
https://moz.com/blog?page=28