Question on Moving Content

[TheBatesMillStore]

I just moved my site from a Wordpress hosted site to Squarespace. We have the same domain, however, the content is now located on a different URL (again, same base domain).

I'm unable to easily set up 301 redirects for the old content to be mapped to the new content so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a workaround. Basically, I want to make sure google knows that Product A's page is now located at this new URL. (www.domain.com/11245 > www.domain.com/product-a).

Maybe it's something that I don't have to worry about anymore because the old content is gone? I mean, I have a global redirect set up that no matter what you enter after the base domain, it now goes to the homepage but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something here.

Really appreciate your help!

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

I've not used Squarespace but this looks like your answer here: http://help.squarespace.com/guides/how-do-i-create-url-shortcuts-or-mappings

I think they are calling them "shortcuts" or "mappings" and not "redirects" but looks like it achieves what you need. As others have said the global catch all isn't very ideal, you should definitely individually redirect old pages.

Hope that helps!

[TommyTan]

HI,

If I understand correctly, you have your old site on Wordpress and now you switch over to another CMS (Squarespace).  You can set up your redirect in Wordpress.  You can download a redirect plugin to do so or if you are already using a SEO plugin on Wordpress, they should offer 301 redirects.

The global redirect will help redirect all the traffic from the old site to the new site which is good.  However, that is not the best practice when visitors want to visit Content A on the old site and then it redirects to your new site's HP.  They would simply leave the site because they are not seeing what they were looking for.  It would be best to redirect www.olddomain.com/content-a >>> www.newdomain.com/content-a

[George.Fanucci]

When you are porting a website, there are several key considerations.

Do you have access to Google Analytics? Google Webmaster Tools? Historical data?

Besides Google SERPs, your traffic may be coming from many different sources. How many are REFERRED from other sites, via external links? How many are DIRECT traffic from old visitors who saved the URL as a favorite, or e-mailed the old URL to a friend?

That is why you need to know your top landing pages, and make sure to handle redirecting old URLs to new URLs.

[George.Fanucci]

Since you are changing the URLs, is there any way to redirect each of you OLD URLs to their corresponding new URL? Unless you can do that, your porting will be one step forward, two steps back. Until Google ranks all your new pages (URLs) it will be hit-or-miss. Google may take days, weeks, or months to rank and settle your new URLs into the SERPs.

[TheBatesMillStore]

Thanks for the response! Unfortunately, the integrated Squarespace solution that you mention doesn't work for me because the content was hosted on another site according to their customer service. Not sure if this may make you suggest anything out of the box? Thanks again for your help. It's appreciated!

[GlobeRunner]

Just about every CMS out there has a way to set up 301 redirects from your old content to the new URLs. I did a quick Google search for "squarespace 301 redirect" and found several sites with tutorials on how to do that. I believe it's related to shortcuts, although I haven't used Squarespace before.

I would try your best to redirect as much of the old content to the new content. You might even take a look at your site's backlinks and see if there are any links to internal pages on your site (rather than to your home page). Those links are the ones you're going to want to redirect.

I would also take a look at Google Webmaster Tools and see the errors there. They'll point out the most important ones to get corrected, and I would go ahead and set up redirects for those pages that are listed.

A redirect for all the content, including what you're calling a "global redirect" is okay, but it's more like a last resort than what I recommend. If you can redirect an old URL to the new location that is preferred.