Changing your CMS platform is a little like moving your household. You need to let the people, and Google bots know where you are going to migrate your website. And this is all about the 301 redirect!
Let’s take a deeper insight into why the website URL may be changed:
- One of the reasons why people might consider modifying their domain name is that they want their websites to be supplied with ccTLD (country code top-level domain), or give the website more authority by switching the URL from a hosted site to its own domain, or the new domain name may be more relevant than the existing one.
- Another reason is CMS migration. Due to the fact that each content management system has its own way of link building, the URL of the existing website will be changed.
301 Redirect Is Your SEO Lifesaver
If you need to change the URL of a page, Google recommends that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page.
How does it work?
Like any other redirects, the 301 redirect automatically sends a visitor from the old domain to the new one. But it has one exceptional feature of notifying both, the users and the search engines that the URL has moved, but the content stayed the same or was partially refreshed. The search engine understands that the page is not new, and moves along the link juice of the original site to the new URL.
Why is it vital?
Setting a 301 redirect to your website is an important point because Google and other search engines prefer well-trafficked, established sites for their rankings. Therefore, being classified as “the same page” rather than “new” is necessary. Page “life duration” is important to the search engines because more established sites have more visitors and therefore more SEO power. They have many inbound links which are reliable. Every click on the website page is like a “vote” for the site’s authority, so Google and other search engines consider the site to be valuable and rank it higher. When a redirect classifies a page as “newly-created,” all the power and authority already established by site traffic vanishes.
What is the solution?
With aisite automated service migration, you can set 301 redirect to your website. Follow these instructions if you want to preserve SEO.
Before migrating your website to WordPress, install one of the following plugins: Redirection or Simple 301 Redirects. In case you want to move your site to Joomla, then install this ReDJ Extension beforehand. And if Drupal is your target CMS platform, then you should set up Redirect Module. After that proceed with your migration by choosing 301 redirect option in your Migration Wizard. And in this way, you will preserve SEO juice of your site.
