Correctly redirecting your URLs is one of the most important things you can do to make a site migration go smoothly, but there are clear processes to follow if you want to get it right. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins breaks down the rules of redirection for site migrations to make sure your URLs are set up for success.
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Video Transcription
Hey, guys. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz. What we're going to be talking about today is redirects and how they're one way that you can make or break your site migration. Site migration can mean a lot of different things depending on your context.
Migrations?
I wanted to go over quickly what I mean before we dive into some tips for avoiding redirection errors. When I talk about migration, I'm coming from the experience of these primary activities.
CMS moving/URL format
One example of a migration I might be referring to is maybe we're taking on a client and they previously used a CMS that had a default kind of URL formatting, and it was dated something.
So it was like /2018/May/ and then the post. Then we're changing the CMS. We have more flexibility with how our pages, our URLs are structured, so we're going to move it to just /post or something like that. In that way a lot of URLs are going to be moving around because we're changing the way that those URLs are structured.
"Keywordy" naming conventions
Another instance is that sometimes we'll get clients