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

  1. Click on the Domain redirects tab under Tools in the left toolbar in your dashboard.
  2. In the “Source URL” field, enter the old page name extension. From the example above, this is : /2014/services/contact-us.html.
  3. 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.
  4. The “Type” for redirect allows you to chose from a permanent redirect (301) or a temporary redirect (302).
  5. Click “Add” to keep the changes you’ve made to the redirect.
  6. 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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