Blog / seo wednesday
Redirects done right: moving pages without losing rankings
301s and 302s in plain terms, mapping old URLs to new ones, avoiding chains, and testing, so a site change does not throw away rankings.
SEO Wednesday returns with the topic behind most of the "our traffic fell off a cliff" tickets we see: redirects. Redesigns, restructures, and domain changes all move URLs, and every moved URL is a promise you have to keep. Google spent years learning that a page lives at one address. Break the address without a forwarding order and the rankings attached to it evaporate.
The mechanics are genuinely simple. The failures are almost always in the planning, not the syntax.
301 versus 302, in plain terms
A 301 says "this page has moved permanently, update your records." Google transfers the old URL's accumulated standing to the new one and, over time, swaps it in the index.
A 302 says "temporarily elsewhere, keep the old address on file." Useful for a page briefly parked during maintenance. Wrong for a move you do not intend to reverse.
The rule for a redesign or migration is short: use 301s. Google has become more forgiving about treating long-lived 302s as permanent, but "eventually Google figures out what you meant" is not a plan. Say what you mean.
One more plain truth: a 301 passes rankings between comparable pages. Redirecting forty retired product pages to your homepage does not preserve forty pages of rankings; Google treats that pattern roughly like the pages returning "not found." Redirect each old URL to its genuine replacement, or accept the loss honestly with a 404.
Map before you move
Before anything goes live, build a two-column list: every old URL, and the new URL that answers the same need. Export the old URLs from your sitemap, Search Console's performance report, or your analytics. Sort by traffic so you see immediately which pages carry weight.
Then write the mapping, one honest line at a time. This spreadsheet is the actual migration; everything after it is typing. It is also the step people skip when a redesign is running late, which is how a business ends up discovering in September that its best-ranking service page has been quietly dead since July.
If your move involves changing hosts as well as URLs, do them separately. A host move alone should change no URLs at all, which is exactly why it is the safer of the two projects; we covered what to ask before one in our moving-hosts questions post.
Chains, loops, and where redirects live
A redirect chain is A to B to C to D, usually built up over years of redesigns, each one redirecting to the previous site's URLs. Every hop adds delay, and long chains leak. When you add new redirects, point old URLs straight at the final destination and update any existing rules that now point at an intermediate stop.
Loops (A to B to A) simply take the page down, and browsers will tell your visitors so in plain text.
As for where the rules go: on our cPanel hosting you can add 301s in the .htaccess file, through cPanel's Redirects tool, or with a WordPress plugin such as Redirection. For a handful of rules, any of these is fine. For hundreds, .htaccess processed at the server is tidier than making WordPress evaluate a long list on every request.
Test like you doubt yourself
Test the top mappings before launch on a staging copy if you can, and the whole list right after. Paste old URLs into a browser and confirm you land on the right new page, not just any page. For bulk checks, curl -I old-url shows the status code and destination in one line, and free bulk header checkers do the same for a pasted list.
Then watch Search Console for the following few weeks. The Coverage and Performance reports will surface old URLs that are 404ing, which is your punch list. Expect some ranking wobble for a few weeks even in a clean migration; that is normal settling, not failure.
Keep the redirects in place for years, not months. Old links live in bookmarks, other sites, and printed invoices far longer than you would guess.
The best redirect is none
Finally, the option agencies rarely lead with: leave the URLs alone. A redesign does not require new URLs. If a page ranks and its address is merely ugly, the ugly address is an asset with history, and moving it is pure risk for cosmetic gain. Change URLs when the structure genuinely must change, and otherwise let sleeping links lie.
Planning a restructure or a domain change and unsure what it will break? Open a ticket with our support team before you flip the switch, and we will help you sanity-check the plan.