Page Re-Direct Fields
As the age of the Internet evolves, many companies are updating an existing site rather than building a brand new one. Oftentimes, these existing sites already enjoy a strong presence in the organic search results and be driving a lot of traffic to the site.
When a site is being re-designed, one must take into consideration that major search engines like Google have probably indexed more than just the home page of the website. Typically many pages within a website are being indexed and ranked by the search engines for particular keyword phrases. It is essential when updating a website that one utilize the same file names or point the old file names to those in the new site.
Historically, for the few firms that actually utilized this practice, IT personnel would install 301 server side re-directs that instructed the server to route searches for particular pages to pages in the new site. This was often a very time consuming process and many people would ignore this process or just route all of the old pages to the new home page.
For SEO purposes, we have always advised people building websites that would replace existing websites to install page-to-page server side re-directs. When we designed Empoweren, we integrated this feature into every page so that those building the new site could configure the re-directs with no assistance from the IT department.
To access this feature, one can simply click on the Meta Data / Redirects tab shown here:
Once open, enter the URL of the page on the previous site that this page is replacing so that it automatically forwards here once the new site goes live.
