I didn’t think I would match that number of migrations again.

I had several clients pulling the trigger and migrating to a new CMS. Last year I declared July and August “ the summer of migrations” for me. Actually, it can be extremely frustrating for users. If someone searches for a specific category, product, or service, and you redirect them to the homepage of your site, or a less-relevant category page, then that’s not the greatest user experience. Crazy timing!įrom a user perspective, this makes complete sense. Barry Schwartz covered that on Search Engine Roundtable this moring. In addition to the clip above, John Mueller commented once again today in another webmaster hangout video. Here’s a video clip of John Mueller explaining the situation in a webmaster hangout video: That’s an incredibly important point to understand. The new page will not retain the rankings and traffic of the old page (as Google is seeing the page as a 404, and Google will ultimately remove that page from its index). So your nifty redirect to save search equity will actually mean nothing. Signals will apparently not be passed to the destination page via the 301 redirect. So, when this happens, you won’t be retaining search equity during the move like you thought, keeping those strong rankings, and subsequent traffic from those pages. Here’s a quick diagram representing the situation: And that means Google will eventually remove those pages from the index (treating them as standard 404s), even though they properly redirect to other pages on your site. That means Google will essentially view the original pages that are being redirected as 404s.

He has always said that redirects to the homepage or non-relevant pages can be treated as soft 404s. Should you redirect the older pages to a different product or category? What about redirecting to the homepage? I mean, you want to save as much search equity as possible, right? But will that actually work?īack to my first point about questions that John has been asked and his response. When running into situations like this, many webmasters are confused with what to do. They rank well, have built inbound links, etc. And maybe those pages held a lot of search equity. For example, product A should redirect to the new url for product A on the new site.īut what about situations where you won’t have a corresponding page on the new site? For example, maybe the product or service isn’t available anymore, a category has been removed, etc. When you are changing urls, it’s extremely important to redirect older pages to the newer urls using a one to one mapping, if possible (via 301 redirects).

Over the past few years, Google’s John Mueller has been asked many questions about where to best redirect pages during a redesign or website migration.

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