When redesigning or migrating a site, creating and implementing a redirection plan is one of the essential steps for maintaining SEO performance.
Indeed, without it we quickly find ourselves facing 2 major problems:
- Immediately after the new site goes live, it loses all the traffic from search engines, while the new URLs are indexed.
- The site loses all the backlinks it had, and therefore all the popularity it had acquired, which results in a downgrade in the results pages.
It is therefore important to create a relevant and comprehensive redirection plan. To do this, we will have to create a mapping containing all of the old pages and send them back to their new equivalent, or if there is none to the page that comes closest to it. The redirects must be 301 redirects , said to be permanent.
First, you will need to collect all of the current URLs. For this you can:
- Crawling your current site
- Scraper the pages indexed by Google, which go up with the command “site:”
- Use Google Analytics to get the URLs that receive the most traffic
- Use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs to find out which URLs receive backlinks
- Use Google Search Console to find out which URLs generate impressions on results pages
- Use Google Search Console to recover and fix 404 errors
- Retrieve existing 301 redirects and update them
Once all the current URLs have been collected, they will need to be assigned a new equivalent to which they will be referred.
To avoid a drop in visibility from search engines as much as possible, it will be important to make a good page-to-page redirection plan.
That is to say that, for an e-commerce site for example, all the product pages of the old site must refer to the equivalent product pages of the new site and not to the parent page, which would in this case be there the new category page. This is how the redirection plan is created.
Need To Level Up Your Business?
To know more about how we can help you to boost your website’s performance, Contact Us.
