Redirects are a very useful way of preserving your SEO ranking when making the switch to a new web host.
Many search engines, such as Google, build up a ranking for your website's pages. This will depend on their address (URL). Changing the address could have a negative impact on your SEO ranking. To help preserve this ranking, you can make use of a redirect whenever you'd like to change the URL structure.
For example :
You are switching your website over to PageCloud.
Your old website's contact page was www.example.com/2014/services/contact-us.html. You want something easy to remember instead and want to change this to www.example.com/contactus
In this case, you can use a redirect. This ensures that people visiting www.example.com/2014/services/contact-us.html, they will see www.example.com/contactus instead, persevering the SEO ranking that you've already built.
To Setup a Redirect for your Site
- Click on the Domain redirects tab under Tools in the left toolbar in your dashboard.
- In the “Source URL” field, enter the old page name extension. From the example above, this is : /2014/services/contact-us.html.
- The “Destination Page” allows you to select a page from your PageCloud. This is the page that your visitors see when following the Source URL.
- The "Type" for redirect allows you to chose from a permanent redirect (301) or a temporary redirect (302).
- Click “Add” to keep the changes you’ve made to the redirect.
- You can now test out your redirect by accessing the old page via the old web address. This should then redirect you to your new PageCloud page.
You cannot redirect a page that currently exists on your PageCloud site (wether it is in Draft or Live mode). Only page names that do not exist on your site can be redirected.
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