Every now and then all of us need to refresh our lives, the same goes for our business and its online presence.
When you update your website, or create a whole new one, it is important to ensure that your current URLs point to the relevant page on your new website.
After all, all that hard work that you have put into creating social postings, blogs and marketing campaigns will be wasted if your customers are going to ‘404 - page not found’ pages on your website.
Over the years there have been many debates among those in the online marketing industry about how best to link your current website pages to your new website. Now the debate is (pretty much) over.
Google trend analyst, John Mueller, has openly recommended (vary rare for a Google employee to make recommendations) that people migrating from HTTP to HTTPS do so with 301 redirects on a per URL basis.
Whilst implementing an SSL certificate on to a website to change the URLs from HTTP to HTTPs isn’t exactly the same as changing to a new website, the principles are the same. You have old URLs from your current website, and you need to transfer these URLs to the relevant page on your new website.
This gives us a very strong indication of what is required when we change to HTTPs but also when we move to a new website.
John Mueller explained the reasoning behind his recommendation by stating that if you start using other kinds of HTTP's results codes for redirects then Google have to view it as more than a general site move. This viewpoint then makes Google reprocess each and every URL on your website, a far longer process which prevents you from moving on with your new website.
You can read more on this statement via SearchEngineLand.com and their article ‘When Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS, Google says to use 301 redirects’.
Published: 23rd Aug 2018