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.
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.
There are some opinions that it is not possible to guarantee 100% SEO rankings on the new URL, but from my perspective, it can be 110% or more if the new web page has a better page load speed and a more optimized design.
*Note: After you purchase the migration tool, the SEO URL Redirects plugin will be available for download in your Account Dashboard > Migrations > Additional Modules.