What is URL Redirect?
To begin with, it’s important to understand that the redirection process only occurs on your new website, it doesn’t affect your domain as well as your live URLs; it solely redirects the URL Paths. The URLs indexed by search engines (such as Google and Bing) are live URLs and they belong to your current website.
URL = Domain + URL Path
If you’re not tech-savvy and still unsure how it all works, let’s break it down with an example. Imagine you’re setting up a new site on a subdomain and migrating your data from your current live site to this new one.
Let’s say you have a product with the URL: http://domain.com/product-source. Here, ‘/product-source’ is the URL Path. After migrating the product to your new site, its copied version has a new URL: http://subdomain.com/product-target. These two URLs are different because they belong to different websites.
To seamlessly redirect users from the old URL to the new one, we first need to redirect the old URL Path to the new URL Path on the new site. So, ‘/product-source’ should be redirected to ‘/product-target’, meaning http://subdomain.com/product-source redirects to http://subdomain.com/product-target. This is what will happen after you complete the data migration.
The actual redirection of URLs will only take place after you transfer the domain to your new site. At that point, http://domain.com/product-source will automatically redirect to http://domain.com/product-target, and your mission will be accomplished!
*Scenario: when someone does a Google search and clicks on the URL: http://domain.com/product-source, the web browser will take him to this new URL: http://domain.com/product-target and tell Google that the old URL has been redirected. After a period of time, Google will replace the old URL with the new one.
Our SEO URL Redirects plugin
Our migration tool is designed to migrate the old URL Paths to the redirection system on the new website.
If the e-commerce platform of your new site natively supports 301 redirect, we don’t need to do anything else. If not, we will install our SEO URL Redirects plugin to your new site. This plugin will perform 301 redirects from the old URL Paths to the new ones.
*Note: After you purchase the migration tool, the URL Redirects plugin will be available for download in your Account Dashboard > Migrations > Additional Modules.
How URL Redirect affects SEO
When a URL is redirected, the old web page’s URL would be removed from Search Engine Index and replaced with the new web page’s URL. As a result, the web page’s ranking will be maintained and seamlessly transitioned to its new URL. This process is fully reflected and reported in Google Search Console.
Please note that changing URLs and setting up redirects can temporarily affect your site’s rankings on Google. Specifically, the URLs of your old web pages will not be removed immediately but will still appear on Google Search. Naturally, Google will not allow both the old and new web pages to be displayed together. Therefore, they will gradually demote the rankings of the old URLs and elevate the rankings of the new URLs, leading to a temporary drop in the rankings of the old URLs. Over time, as Google processes the changes and the new URLs gain authority, rankings typically recover.
There are some opinions suggesting that it’s impossible to guarantee 100% preservation of the website’s rankings on the new URLs. However, from our perspective, it could reach 110% or more if the new site has better page load speeds and an optimized design.