Redirects are a critical part of running a successful website, but often little attention is paid to the process of managing them.
Without redirect management, you may see important redirects removed, users redirected to the wrong location, or loss of link equity for website SEO.
Redirect management needs to be future-proof and resilient without becoming a burden on the team.
have several goals redirect management process:
- Redirects and process should be easy to maintain and manage.
- Avoid redirect chains – Single jump whenever possible.
- Enable analytics tracking or other usage visibility.
It’s important to remember that over the future life cycle of a website, stakeholders, technology stacks, and the entire web will inevitably change.
At some point in the future, the site is likely to undergo a CMS migration, extensive URL changes, media file location changes, or top sites will start using some new technology that affects your URLs.
Over time, this change will also occur across teams responsible for:
- decide what technology Redirects will be handled.
- Create, edit or delete redirect.
- Determine which URLs Where (and why) it should redirect.
Of course, from a technical point of view, there are many options and kinds of redirects, and they all have specific use cases and anti-patterns – 3xx redirects, meta refreshes, JavaScript, htaccess vs httpd.conf, etc.
In this article, you will learn about redirect management independent of the technology used.
Common Use Cases for Redirects
While there are other uses for redirects on a website, the three most common uses that need to be managed for large websites can be described as:
- Page has moved.
- Vanity redirect.
- Utility redirection.
Manage “Page Move” redirects
If an established web page is moved from an old location to a new location, redirects are required to help humans and robots find the new location when trying to access the old location.
People might bookmark the old URL, or they might find a link to the old URL in a web page or email, or they might see it printed somewhere and enter it.
Search bots may find old URLs as links on web pages or when recrawling their existing page index.
In either case, providing a redirect is the correct way to indicate that the item is in the new location.
There are two general types of “page move” redirects possible: pattern-matched batches and one-shots.
Pattern matching redirect batches are manageable
If every URL in a site or directory is changed in a consistent manner, the necessary redirect rules can be very simple and practical to maintain forever Little maintenance is required.
For example, if you move your company newsroom page from “https://newsroom.domain.com” to “https://www.domain.com/newsroom/”, otherwise the structure of the newsroom URL remains the same, then a single rule can handle all redirects.
This single rule is also unlikely to conflict with new unrelated redirects.
Maintaining this and similar one-line rules during future CMS or redirect management platform changes is not difficult.
One of the great benefits of using pattern matching redirects is the ability to easily make adjustments in the future, such as editing the query string or changing the redirect pattern when another large-scale change occurs (e.g. Website migrated to https).
A single one-time redirect list becomes unmanageable
A 1:1 redirect list is required if a single page needs to have different URLs, or a group of pages needs to have different URLs, but there is no simple consistent pattern.
For example, if your blog post’s URL is “domain.com/blog/devops-conferences-2021.html” and you want to change it to “domain.com/blog/devops-conferences.html” and refresh the content with the new a year (and create a persistent URL), then you need to create a 1:1 redirect from the old location to the new location.
While a batch of pattern matching redirects can easily be maintained permanently, a one-off is more likely to eventually need to be retired.
In case your site is migrated to a new CMS someday in the future, or your redirect manager runs out of space – in these cases redirects may not be preserved.
John Mueller suggests that redirects need to be maintained for Google’s sake at least one year when the page moves.
It would be nice to keep this type of redirect activity going for years, but it’s probably not possible.
Therefore, when deciding which redirects to remove or maintain in the future, it is important to have a way of knowing when the redirects are active and how often they are accessed.
Manage vanity redirects
Groups of redirects, commonly referred to as “vanity redirects” or “vanity URLs,” are shortened URLs designed to be typed, remembered, and/or easy to read.
Vanity redirects are almost necessarily one-offs.
A common misconception among many stakeholders of large websites is the need for vanity URLs with no use case.
if Canonical URL If a product page on a business website is 3 or 4 folders deep, stakeholders may request a vanity redirect to the actual location.
However, this redirect doesn’t help the user unless they know to type it into the browser.
An eternal feature of the web is that users rarely enter URLs into their browsers rather than clicking on links when using the Internet.
Really useful vanity redirects are redirects that users read or hear when they’re not using the internet.
Magazine ads, billboards, podcasts or radio ads – these are all great uses for vanity retargeting.
In these cases, people need to remember and type the address easily. “Visit acme.com/piano to get your free piano!” would be perfect.
If vanity retargeting isn’t needed—if there’s no plan for magazine or podcast ads—then it almost certainly doesn’t need to exist.
Vanity redirects that no one uses don’t help your site’s SEO or usability.
When all redirects need to be migrated to the new system, these can become a nightmare trying to figure out which ones are still needed or not.
Admin utility redirection
A utility redirect is a redirect, usually pattern matching, for technical or governance purposes.
Common utility redirects include:
- HTTP to HTTPS.
- Add or remove “www.”
- Add or remove trailing slashes or “.html”
- Force lowercase only.
- Add, delete, or edit query strings.
Because these are pattern matched, they can be easily maintained and changed in the future.
When combining multiple utility redirects with page movement and vanity redirects, it’s important to think carefully about the order of operations – the goal is to have as few jumps as possible in the process and ease of maintenance in the future.
Utility redirects can reduce the number of one-time vanity redirects required by automating and simplifying them.
For example, enforcing lowercase can in some cases eliminate the need to create multiple versions of the same vanity URL.
The last thing you want is for one of your company executives to think about all the possible vanity URL shells they want to use in their podcasting campaign!
Non-human readable shortened URL
A class of redirects that span between utility and vanity is shortened url Content that is not intended to be remembered or easily entered by the user.
These are often used in QR codes to reduce the length of URLs (thus making QR codes easier to scan), or by social media users using bit.ly or similar platforms to see how many clicks their shared links are getting.
For major websites, URL shortening is not required for analytics tracking, although QR use cases may be supported.
redirect analysis
The best way to learn how to use redirects is to append a query string to the target of certain types of redirects.
Vanity redirects, QR code redirects, and one-time page move redirects are all use cases for query strings, leading to analytics tracking redirect usage.
Etrade.com provides an example of using query strings on nothingness redirects.
For example, etrade.com/stockplans redirects to https://us.etrade.com/stock-plans?vanity=stockplans.
This allows Etrade to understand how many people have used the redirect over time, and what types of actions users take once they reach the site.
Analytics data on redirect usage can help web teams determine which redirects need maintenance or can be removed, and which activities generate the most visitors and engagement.
Analytical tracking of utility redirects (such as HTTP to HTTPS) provides less value because websites are likely to keep these redirects in place whether or not they are used frequently.
These considerations should be used to establish a set of query string rules that make the most sense for the site and team:
Specify the full redirect path in the query string:
- Usually slashes and dots should be replaced by hyphens.
Indicate the type of redirect:
- 301, 302JavaScript, etc. are all possible.
- Vanity, utility, page movement, QR codes, etc. are all possible.
Date added.
Indicate the team responsible for the redirect.
Not all of this information must be included in the redirect target query string, but it can.
Once query strings are implemented on redirect targets, teams can review usage on an annual or other cadence.
For example, when a vanity redirect is created for a specific campaign that is already running, and that redirect has not been used for two or three years, then it’s time to stop maintaining that old redirect.
Redirect anti-pattern
Redirects have many anti-patterns.
These seem like a good quick fix, but end up causing more problems than solving and should be avoided.
Some redirection anti-patterns include:
- Redirect 404 page to homepage.
- redirect to 404 error instead of giving 404 errors on non-existing URLs.
- redirect to redirect (chain redirection).
- Redirect without updating the page There are redirect links above (internal link to redirect).
- use redirection A/B testing instead of manipulating the DOM.
- Links to non-following redirects – Make users click on a link thinking they will find a specific item on the site, but then they are redirected to a different location (leaving users frustrated and searching the site for what they think they will find).
Many redirection anti-patterns can be addressed by following two principles:
- never link to internal redirects. When a page is decommissioned, find all internal links to old pages and delete or update those links.
- Allow old pages without replacement to become 404 – and make sure to remove links to them
wrap up
Some governance and process around redirects can keep your site clean and your users happy.
Implement analytics tracking on redirects to review and remove old redirects that do not require maintenance in the future.
Do not link to redirects internally unless there is a valid reason.
Following these basic steps will set your site up for future success and maintainability.
More resources:
Featured image: duangphorn wiriya/Shutterstock
