Moving a page without losing what it earned

Permanent versus temporary

A permanent redirect is the one you almost always want. It says this address is now that address, forever, and search engines transfer what the old page had earned to the new one.

A temporary redirect says the original will return, so engines keep the old address stored and do not move anything across. It is the right answer for maintenance, a seasonal page, or a regional variant.

Using temporary when you meant permanent is common and it quietly costs you everything the old page had built. The engine keeps waiting for a return that never comes.

Using temporary when you meant permanent quietly costs you everything the old page built, because the engine keeps waiting for a return that never comes.

When you need them

Changing a page address. Merging two pages into one. Retiring a service and pointing at its replacement. Moving to a new domain. Consolidating www and non www, or insecure to secure.

In every one of those cases, something already links to the old address. Other sites, bookmarks, your own old pages, printed material, and the search index itself.

Without a redirect, all of that arrives at nothing. The visitor leaves and the standing the address earned simply evaporates.

• Changing a page address
• Merging two pages into one
• Retiring a service and pointing at its replacement
• Moving to a new domain
• Consolidating www and non-www
• Forcing the secure version
• Fixing a mistyped address that gets real traffic

The redesign that loses everything

The most expensive mistake in this field is relaunching a site with a new address structure and no redirect map. Traffic falls over the following weeks and it looks mysterious.

It is not mysterious. Every address the search engine knew now returns nothing, and it drops them. Every link anybody ever made to you is broken at once.

Before any relaunch, export the full list of existing addresses, decide the new address for each, and build the redirects as part of the launch rather than after somebody notices.

Export the full list of existing addresses before the relaunch, decide the new address for each, and build the redirects as part of the launch rather than after somebody notices.

Redirect to the equivalent page

Point each old address at the page that serves the same purpose. If the content is gone entirely, point at the closest section rather than at the homepage.

Redirecting everything to the homepage is worse than useless. Engines treat a mass redirect to an unrelated page as a missing page anyway, and visitors arrive somewhere that does not answer them.

Where nothing equivalent exists, returning a proper missing page response is the honest answer and does less harm than a misleading redirect.

Chains and loops

A chain is an address redirecting to another redirect, which redirects again. Each hop costs time for the visitor and some patience from the crawler, and long chains stop being followed.

Chains build up over years of small changes. Nobody creates one on purpose, and any site more than a few years old usually has several.

Point every old address at the final destination directly. A loop, where two addresses redirect to each other, breaks the page entirely and should be found by testing rather than by a customer.

Chains accumulate over years of small changes. Any site more than a few years old usually has several, and nobody created one on purpose.

How long to keep them

Indefinitely, if you can. Links on other sites persist for years, and an old link arriving at nothing is a visitor lost and a signal wasted.

Search engines do eventually transfer everything and stop needing the redirect, and the humans following an old link do not.

The cost of keeping a redirect is close to zero, so there is rarely a reason to remove one.

How ours work

Sites published through Website Builder Studio serve one address form and redirect the variants permanently, so the trailing slash and extension questions are settled before anybody asks.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, which includes confirming that links resolve rather than bouncing through hops.

If you are moving an existing site here, prepare the address list first. That map is the most valuable thing you bring with you.

If you are moving an existing site, the address map is the most valuable thing you bring with you — see broken links and missing pages.