Redirect

Changing an address used to mean the old one simply stopped existing. If the new page loaded, the move was considered done.

The problem is everything outside that still points at the old address: the entry in search results, the backlinks other sites built to your page, links people saved. All of them now aim at nothing. A visitor sees a not-found page and leaves, and the search engine concludes the page is gone and discards the standing it had accumulated. Restructuring blog addresses once and watching search traffic fall by more than half over six months is how this arrives.

It hands a request for the old address over to the new one, moving both the people and the accumulated standing. Four things to settle in practice.

1. Choose permanent or temporary. Marked permanent, a search engine swaps the indexed address for the new one and carries the old address's standing across. Marked temporary, the old address stays the canonical one, which is only appropriate during brief maintenance. Leave a completed move marked temporary and the standing accumulates on neither address.
2. Collapse the chain to one hop. Old address to intermediate to final adds load time and leaks a little standing at each step. After two restructures, point the first address straight at the final one.
3. Leave one address per piece of content. With and without www, with and without a trailing slash, http and https all open at once produces duplicate content, the same material living at several addresses. Pick one as canonical and send the rest there.
4. Map one to one when moving a site. Sending every retired page to the home page reads to a search engine as the content having disappeared. Pair each old address with its closest new equivalent, and route only the genuinely unmatched ones to an explanatory page.

Leave the rules in place for at least a year. That's roughly how long search results and other people's links take to catch up, and removing them earlier undoes the work.

"When you change this address, make it a permanent redirect."

Carry the accumulated standing over to the new address rather than starting again.

"There's a three-hop chain here. Point the first one straight at the end."

Collapse the intermediate steps so nothing leaks at each hop.

"Don't send every retired page to the home page."

An unmapped redirect does more harm than good.

When Pagedeck restructured its help addresses, Theo mapped 420 old addresses to new ones individually. Ravi sorted that list by search traffic and checked the top 40 first. Three of them pointed at the wrong destination, and they were fixed before the release went out.