Building a Redirect Strategy

Redirects help preserve search engine equity by transferring authority from a legacy location to a new location with the use of a 301 Permanent Redirect Status Code.

But, far too often I’m looped into website migration projects where redirects are overlooked or underestimated. This can happen for a variety of reasons:

• The brand assumes redirects aren’t necessary: Perhaps they believe the change won’t impact rankings or traffic.
• Redirects are deprioritized: Other tasks take precedence, leaving this crucial step as an afterthought.
• Redirects are over-simplified: For example, blanket redirects to the homepage or failing to map URLs accurately.

One of the biggest oversimplifications on redirects is that all you need is a basic “redirect map” that points your old URLs to your new ones.

A well-thought-out redirect strategy goes beyond simply mapping old to new URLs. It requires careful planning to ensure that your redirects not only preserve traffic but also maintain user experience and search engine equity.

In this post, I’ll explore:

• Why a redirect strategy is vital during a site migration.
• How to migrate without losing search traffic or rankings.
• Key considerations to keep in mind when building a comprehensive redirect strategy.

Redirects are often treated as an afterthought, but they’re one of the most important parts of a successful migration. Let’s dive in!

What is a Redirect Strategy?

A website and its maintenance is composed of different components.

Websites are made up of various properties, including different pages and page types. Additionally, there are team members responsible for maintaining those pages, along with the technologies that power them.

It’s not so much, we have X amount of pages. Rather, we have this web ecosystem that drives our online experience. 

Why does this matter in a website migration?

Each part of the ecosystem can influence decisions about migrating or retiring site sections during a project, ultimately affecting your SEO and how search engines perceive your site.

For example, suppose your site migration involves retiring a separate mobile site and consolidating it into a unified experience. What you might not realize is that the mobile site’s redirect capabilities could be managed by a web traffic or technology partner, such as Akamai.

What you have to consider in this example is how Akamai and your mobile site will fit into your redirect strategy.

• Will it be a laborious effort?
• What aspects of the mobile site are driving up the level of effort?
• Can it be programmatically managed?
• Within what guidelines will the redirects be managed?

You see, it’s not just a redirect map.

It’s a matter of leveraging your resources to efficiently and effectively migrate a site experience..

Where Does That Leave a Redirect Map?

With the above definition in mind, is a redirect map important?

Definitely.

(Read about my worst migration project and discover what a lack of a redirect map can do to your site launch).

A redirect map is the tangible result of a well-defined redirect strategy, detailing individual redirect rules. Having these mappings is just as essential as having the strategy itself.

A redirect map is significant as it continues to drive the redirect strategy forward by directly mapping legacy URLs to their new destinations.

Building a Redirect Strategy

At this stage, you might be wondering how to develop a solid redirect strategy.

To create an effective approach, it’s important to understand all the components of a migration—this includes your teams, site pages, and more. Let’s break it down.

Taking A Page Inventory

Understanding which pages are performing well in search is crucial. This insight allows you to prioritize which pages need redirects and identify the most critical ones for ensuring a smooth migration.

You can identify top-performing pages using website migration tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics or other data aggregator (I like to use SEMrush or Ahrefs). I recommend gathering at least one year’s worth of performance data for a comprehensive analysis.

I start by pulling organic data to see what is performing within organic search. I then add onto / overlay with top performing pages from other channels. Just because they’re not organic or a part of your SEO project plan doesn’t mean they’re not important to the business. Trust me, your colleagues managing other channels will appreciate you accounting for critical pages beyond those found in organic search.

With a list of performing URLs, I advise you to categorize them. 

You can’t build a strategy by mapping individual URLs one by one. Instead, grouping URLs with common characteristics allows you to identify opportunities for more efficient solutions, ultimately enhancing redirect performance.

E-commerce sites, for example, often include category, subcategory, product, and content pages. I usually handle category and subcategory redirects separately from product page redirects. To streamline this process, I create two distinct categories: “Category” (for all categories and subcategories) and “Product” (for all product pages). This separation enables me to tailor the redirect strategy more effectively for each type.

Where is there a Content Gap?

It’s common for sites to update their experience by reassessing which page assets to migrate. A thorough page inventory, combined with a list of top-performing pages, can help determine which assets to retain after a site migration.

Your teams may decide to adjust the webpage inventory by consolidating pages or expanding specific site sections. However, this can impact your redirect strategy, especially when considering the number of pages on the legacy site and how many can be redirected effectively.

Understanding a site’s content strategy during a migration can affect your redirect strategy. 

I recommend identifying top-performing legacy pages and collaborating with the team managing the content strategy to assess any gaps between site experiences. This approach allows you to leverage the data you’ve gathered and minimize unnecessary disruptions to organic search traffic, particularly for high-traffic pages.

Work Alongside Your Migration Teams

Familiarize yourself with your migration team.

This includes developers, WebOps, content strategists, UXers, project managers, architects, your client teams / stakeholders.

In a typical migration project, you might find yourself collaborating with a team of 10–20 or more individuals.

Understanding the roles and responsibilities of the larger team will shed light on who manages specific aspects of the project and how you can accommodate a migration based on the needs of other team members.

For example, is a top-performing site section being removed from the new site experience? If so, have a conversation with the taxonomist to understand why it’s being removed and share your concerns. This discussion could spark a broader conversation that impacts not only your migration project but also your redirect strategy.

Or perhaps you’re trying to determine the best solutions for handling redirects. In that case, consult your WebOps and development teams to understand the full range of redirect options. Will redirects be managed at the CMS level, the server level, or through a third-party tool? Can you manage them independently, or will you need to file an  SEO development ticket?

Understanding your team members and their roles will help you create an efficient redirect strategy that meets the needs of all stakeholders.

Understanding Web Technologies

You might encounter technical jargon during the migration process that feels unfamiliar or overwhelming—terms like “proxy-this,” “firewall-that,” “Akamai-something,” or “server-whatever.” 

As the migration lead, you don’t need to be an expert in these technologies, but it’s essential to understand how they could impact your redirect strategy.

Example: Akamai redirect handling

Here’s another example of why it’s valuable to understand the technologies at play. 

I worked with a brand that needed to retire their mobile site (m.example.com) but wasn’t sure how to manage it. After consulting their WebOps team, we discovered that their Akamai platform—a web traffic tool that functions as both a firewall and a redirect manager—could handle redirects at scale. This insight allowed us to lean on Akamai for an efficient, en masse mobile site redirect strategy.

Example: Alias file redirects

For instance, I once worked with a client migrating a series of regional websites into an international subfolder structure on their new CMS. While developing the redirect strategy with the project’s technical architects, we identified an opportunity to leverage their Alias file. This approach allowed us to seamlessly intake the legacy international domains and redirect them appropriately to their corresponding subfolders.

This solution was a significant win for our international redirect strategy, providing a flexible yet efficient way to preserve search engine equity across the regional sites.

Depending on the platforms and ecosystem in use, your redirect strategy may involve a mix of solutions—and that’s completely fine. Having a high-level understanding of the technologies that coexist with the pages you need to redirect will help guide the process effectively.

Finding Scalable Solutions

This builds on the earlier discussion of page inventory and technologies and how the two can work together. 

In some cases, you may need to redirect tens of thousands of web pages. Mapping each page individually isn’t practical—it’s time-consuming, resource-intensive, and costly.

That’s why identifying scalable solutions is often a key component of an effective redirection strategy. By leveraging technology and strategic grouping, you can streamline the process and optimize your resources.

Understanding what types of pages make up your inventory will shed light on the level of effort required to build a viable redirect strategy. Additionally, understanding the web technologies will give you an understanding of how to programmatically redirect with ease.

Here’s an example: when building a redirect strategy for an e-commerce site, I like to lean heavily on a product detail page’s SKU or product ID. Reason being, these are identifiers that may not change between the site migration and can be leveraged to map and drive redirect logic within your strategy. 

Within my redirect strategy, I lean on Regex or another expressions-based language, to tie the legacy PDP with its new PDP location. The language may vary, depending on the CMS and technologies. In the best cases, I’d only have to build out 2 rules to drive redirect logic – one rule to account for any parameter URLs and another to account for clean URLs.

By including scalable solutions within your redirect strategy, you can save yourself time and a world of headache, particularly on larger sites.

Working Within a Timeline

Time is a critical asset that teams often overlook. 

The amount of time between being briefed on a site migration and the actual migration date can significantly influence the development and execution of your redirect strategy.

Having more time to strategize increases the likelihood of developing a comprehensive plan that addresses the vast majority of pages.My most successful migrations have looped me in at the onset of the project, months from the launch date. We inventory all webpages, understand who the team players are, and how the technologies work, with enough time to QA.

However, if your team is looped in to migrate a site with a very brief timeline, then you may find yourself having to build a strategy around constraints, not around opportunities.

Example: Redirecting in a rush

In a time-crunched site migration involving thousands of pages, you might focus your strategy on redirecting top-performing pages while redirecting all other pages en masse to a general location, such as the homepage or a category page. Part of your strategy could involve revisiting these general redirects as a follow-up after launch—which is a valid approach.

However, it’s important to note that once the site is live, there will be no shortage of tasks to tackle. Depending on how smoothly the launch goes, redirects might be deprioritized, so careful planning is essential.

My best advice is get looped in as soon as you can within a migration project. The more runway you have, the smoother the landing will be migrating to a new CMS

Don’t Forget the Testing

Let’s say you’ve done your due diligence: you’ve inventoried all your webpages, consulted with your teams, gained an understanding of the technologies involved, and invested significant time and resources into your redirect strategy. The next step is critical—you need to test everything you’ve built.

Testing allows you to confirm that your redirect logic is working as intended, identify any issues, and uncover opportunities to improve efficiency.

The worst scenario I’ve encountered is when teams claim, “Well, it’s behind a login, so we can’t test before launch.” That’s simply not true!

You can crawl a password-protected site using an SEO crawler like Screaming Frog.

For instance, if you need to log in to a CMS to test redirects or perform a site crawl, Screaming Frog’s Form-based Authentication feature makes it possible. 

When you input a URL requiring login credentials, you’ll be prompted to enter them, after which you can proceed to crawl the site.

I’ve successfully used this functionality to crawl staging and development sites before a go-live. It helps identify potential issues with SEO elements like metadata, broken links, and any obstacles to Googlebot’s crawl, ensuring a smoother launch.

Risks compound if you leave testing until after a launch, which could have been avoided during a proper crawl / test of your redirect map.

Exporting the results of the redirect crawl and comparing against the map will tell you what’s working, what’s not, and what can be improved.

Exporting the results of your redirect crawl and comparing them against your planned map helps you identify what’s working, what’s not, and what can be improved. As mentioned earlier, testing also allows you to uncover efficiencies. For example:

• Double Redirects: You might redirect a legacy page to a new location, only for that new page to be retired before launch. Depending on your CMS logic, this could result in a double redirect hop.
• Redirect Loops: It’s not uncommon to accidentally create redirects that point back to themselves. This can cause redirect loops, which should be addressed before launch.

By testing your redirects ahead of time, you can catch and resolve these issues early, ensuring a smoother transition. Be sure to include testing as a critical component of your redirect strategy—it’s an essential step in protecting the work you’ve invested.

Or in some cases, you may have accidentally created redirects that point to themselves – it happens. In such cases, you may create redirect loops that you want to catch before going live. Testing beforehand will give you an opportunity to identify areas where redirect loops exist and adjust accordingly.

With redirects, be sure to carve out a place in your strategy to test the redirects you’ve spent so much time to build.

Discover your Website Launch Stage

You’ll find that creating a redirect strategy is more than just building redirects!

While a redirect map is important, it’s only half the battle without a strategy to guide it. A well-crafted redirect strategy—supported by the right steps and resources—ensures you retain search equity during migration while minimizing risks to your organic performance.

With a better understanding of what a redirect strategy entails, Read “A Timeline of SEO Launch Essentials” to better assess the level of effort for your migration project.