Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Yes, and the way you set up the redirects decides whether search engines carry your rankings across or drop them.
Use permanent redirects
A redirect can say the move is permanent or temporary. Permanent tells search engines to transfer what the old address had earned; temporary tells them to keep indexing the old one.
People pick temporary because it sounds safer. It is the one that loses the rankings.
Redirect page to page
Each old page to the article that replaces it, not everything to the help centre home page. A bulk redirect to the home page reads to a search engine as the content being gone, and to a visitor as being dumped at reception.
Host mapping is the tidier answer
Where the whole help centre should live under your own domain, host mapping puts it there. Then there is nothing to redirect: the content is on your domain from the start, and it keeps building the reputation of one domain rather than two.
Expect a settling period
Search engines take weeks to work through a move. Rankings dip and recover; that is normal and not a sign the redirects are wrong.
What is worth checking during that time is that the redirects themselves resolve, one by one, from a browser.
Keep the list
Whoever manages the website needs a mapping of old address to new. Writing that down while you still remember which article replaced which page is much easier than reconstructing it later.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.