Redirecting Your Paths to Maintain SEO

Migrating your website successfully also means considering how to preserve your SEO, and all of the inbound links you have.

Sitemap (n). The set of all possible paths to all possible pages on your site, emphasizing those that are useful for SEO or direct navigation. The _sitemap.xml file is a common representation of this.

Here are six possible scenarios for your migration from site A to site B.

• You are moving the same domain from A to B;
• > A and B's sitemaps match exactly
• > A's sitemaps are a superset of B's, with no conflicts
• > A's sitemaps and B's sitemaps are different, and collide
• B uses a new domain, the domain from A needs to continue working using its original paths as well as possible;
• > A and B's sitemaps match exactly
• > A's sitemaps are a superset of B's, with no conflicts
• > A's sitemaps and B's sitemaps are different, and collide

Depending on which scenario you're facing, you'll have different challenges and approaches that work best.

Approaches

Your Webflow-hosted site supports;

• 301 redirects from path A to path B, including basic wildcards
• Multiple domain names, typically with one as primary

This covers most basic migration scenarios. Here are some more advanced scenarios that require a different approach;

• A's sitemaps and B's sitemaps conflict, for example you have a _/news page on Site A that is now _/blog on Site B, but Site B also has a _/news page for new content.
• A is only being partially migrated, and parts of it will remain hosted somewhere else outside of your new Webflow site.

Basic Approach - Using Webflow's 301 Redirects

To utilize Webflow's redirects, you need to create a complete map of the paths on your original site, to your new Webflow site. This is best done after your new site is built, but before your old site has been taken offline.

In Webflow, all redirects will apply to all domains you've added to your site, so make certain to consider this as you build your redirect sitemap.

Here's the basic process;

1 - Extract and Build a list of all paths on your origin site

You can type this list manually, or you may be able to export a list from your original publishing system.

If it generates a sitemap.xml, you can use that to extract your list;

https://www.seowl.co/sitemap-extractor/

Note that for some sites, e.g. WP sites, you may have to extract your list from multiple sitemaps.

2 - Extract and Build a list of all paths on your new site

Same process, In Webflow, the sitemap extraction process and/or exports from the CMS are the best way to manually construct this.

3 - Collate them into a redirects map

I load them into a spreadsheet with From and To columns, and match them up manually.

• You'll probably need to do search and replace to remove the protocal and domain portion so that you just have your paths like _{/blog/my-article}.
• Match up everything so that they are adjacent from and to mappings.

4 - Export as CSV, and Import into Webflow's redirects

You'll need to add a paid hosting on your Webflow site now in order to be able to access the 301 Redirects feature. However you won't move your domain name over yet.

See How to Bulk Import 301s.

Advanced Approaches

In more advanced cases Webflow's 301 redirects won't accomplish the job, and you'll need an external solution.

Essentially you'll need to find or build an external redirect service that takes your original requests and forwards them to your new site.

Sygnal builds reverse proxy solutions that can create any re-mapping configuration you want. Contact us if you need help building something unique.

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