Outline

This document provides an overview of the techniques used in a redirect strategy, but we highly recommend that you consult with an in-house or external SEO expert. Madgex cannot provide advice on a per project basis and you should seek the help of someone familiar with these techniques to ensure a smooth transition to your new Madgex platform.

What is a redirect strategy?

A redirect strategy is a means of ensuring that users of a site can find the equivalent content on the new site. Search engines such as Google will use redirects to understand the structure of a new site as well as passing on any SEO authority from the old pages to the new equivalents.

A redirect strategy is therefore a means to minimise any reduction in search volume whilst search engines begin to understand the structure of your new site. This ultimately makes a difference to how well a site ranks post-migration as well as ensuring that users do not receive an error when navigating to a previously saved page.

Creating the strategy

Identifying URLs

Redirect strategies typically start by establishing the pages which are viewed by an audience. Besides the URLs themselves, information such as views, sessions, and impressions are collected which will help you to identify the most popular pages. This information is commonly ascertained from tools such as Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.

It is also common to identify any pages which are linked to from an external site. This could be anything from an editorial site linking to a job board, through to blogs and articles which link to relevant job content on a site.

By the end of this process, a spreadsheet with the possible URLs that could be redirected, alongside information such as views, sessions and impressions is created.

Formulating a strategy

Once the spreadsheet is created, the most important URLs can be considered.  A company may order the URLs by those with the most view, sessions, or impressions to do this.

To be practical, companies tend to make a decision about how many of those URLs should be redirected. For example, deciding that URLs with more than 20 views need a redirect whilst those below aren’t as important. The volume of URLs redirected will be informed by the size of the site, the types of content contained within it and the resource at their disposal.

Deciding on the URL redirects

Once a test site is available, an organisation can begin to identify the URLs that should be redirected to. This would typically involve looking for common themes between the URLs to ensure that relevant content is displayed for those users navigating to an old page.

Many of these pages will have a comparable alternative, such as redirecting blog pages to the Madgex articles section or old search results pages to their Madgex equivalent.

It may be impractical to redirect every single job to the equivalent page on the new platform. In those instances, it’s common to identify similarities between these pages. For example, if many jobs contain the keyword of accountant, redirecting these pages to the Accountancy search results page is a practical alternative. Doing so will ensure that search engines do not flag the content as missing or irrelevantly redirected compared to its original source material.

Implementing the strategy

Creating the redirects

Once a list of the old URLs alongside their destination has been decided on, two options are available.

Creating redirects within the platform

Within the Madgex platform you can manually create a redirect at any time. For example, let’s say I have an old article page I want to redirect:

• Old article URL: http://example.com/blog/redirect_example
• New article URL: https://example.com/article-details/1/redirect_example

I can navigate to the ‘SEO’ section in the CMS where I will be presented with 2 sections: ‘SEO override’ and ‘SEO redirect’. Selecting ‘SEO redirect’, I could then press the button to ‘Create redirect’.  

In the ‘Url match’ area, I would enter the URL I want to redirect (please note that Madgex only require the part of the URL that appears after the domain i.e. /blog/redirect_example).

In the ‘Url destination’ section, I would then enter the URL that I want to redirect to (in this example /article-details/1/redirect_example).

 By clicking ‘Save’, the redirect is complete and I can move on to the next one.

Uploading a spreadsheet

Should the volume of URLs be such that the manual uploading is impractical, it is possible to pass your spreadsheet to Madgex who may be able to take the content and upload the redirects to the site (please note that charges may apply and resource will need to be booked as part of the project).

Testing the redirects

Once complete, a company should test the redirected URLs to ensure that the process has been successful. This may not be possible to do this if the site is not yet live so establishing a testing period as part of the initial launch is useful.

Testing the URLs can be done by inputting the old URL into a browser and ensuring that the correct page is landed on. Additionally, free tools can also be found online which will assist in this process, an example is included in the resources section below.