Redirect Map Builder

How a relaunch loses a site its rankings

Almost never because the new site is worse. Usually because forty URLs that had quietly earned something over six years started returning 404 on a Tuesday, and nobody noticed for a month because the new site looked great and traffic takes a while to fall.

Every page that has been live for years has accumulated something. A link from a supplier. A mention in a forum. A position for a phrase nobody thought to track. None of that is attached to your new design. It is attached to the address.

A redirect is how you move it. One old address, one new address, a permanent instruction, and most of what the old page had earned transfers to the new one.

Redirecting everything to the home page does not work

This is the shortcut, it takes one rule, and it is the single most common way the whole exercise gets wasted.

A redirect to a page that does not answer the same question is treated as a soft 404. The search engine follows it, sees a destination with nothing to do with the request, and files it with the dead pages. You did the work, wrote the rule, and got precisely the outcome you would have had by doing nothing.

The test is simple. Would a person who clicked the old link be satisfied by what they land on? If yes, redirect. If no, you have two honest choices and the home page is not one of them.

The unmatched list is the real output

Pairing the obvious ones is easy and a script can do it. What matters is the list this tool refuses to guess at, because every line on it is a decision only you can make.

For each one, pick the nearest page that genuinely answers the same question. If there is none, let it go, and let it go properly: a 410 tells a search engine the page is deliberately gone and stops it coming back to check. A 404 says the same thing less confidently.

Deciding to drop a page is a legitimate answer. Pretending it moved somewhere it did not is not.

Use a 301, and check that you did

A 301 is permanent and passes the signal. A 302 is temporary and, in principle, does not. Most tools and plugins default to one of them without telling you which, and the difference is invisible in a browser because both land you on the right page.

Check it with your browser's network panel, or a header checking tool, before you call the migration done. An entire redirect map written as 302s looks perfect to everyone except the only reader that matters.

Two other things worth checking at the same time. Redirect chains, where the old page points at a page that points at a third page, should be collapsed so every old address points straight at its final destination. And nothing in your new sitemap should be a redirect, because a sitemap is a list of pages you are asking to have indexed.

Before you switch anything over

Get the complete old list first, and get it from more than one place. Your old sitemap, a crawl of the old site, and the Pages report in Search Console will each know about URLs the others do not. Search Console is the one people skip and it is the one that knows which pages were actually earning anything.

Then keep the map. Six months later, when something looks wrong, the difference between an afternoon and a week is whether you can still see what pointed where.