When Migrating your old website to WordPress 301 redirect is important why ?

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Last updated on December 19th, 2019 @ 12:22 pm

We are already discuss about the important points of the  Migrations process of an old website to a WordPress platform.In that as a final steps i mentioned about 301 URL redirect(301 redirect).Now we can discuss about it little more specifically. 301 redirect is a permanent URL redirection process.URL page redirection is an automatic URL redirection process in which one URL redirect to  another.Usually this is used in some  special situations like Redirect needed from an old obsolete domain to a new domain or may be a non WWW domain to a WWW domain or the most common situation is the same that we are now discussing about.When someone planning to migrate an old website to some other new better platform in which there would have the possibility of changing the  current URL structure to a new one.In Such situations the possibility of drop of search traffic of that particular website is very high. The only possible solution is url redirection.

The most preferred URL redirection process is Server side re direction.Such kind of redirection is done in the server. For this webmasters configure the Apache or IIS servers or they may use server side scripting language like PHP / ASP / ASP.NET . .Another type of redirection process is client side which is lesser preferred.

When we discussing about WordPress sites the 301 URL redirection is suitable . It is the permanent URL redirection .It is the most recommended method for directing the traffic from an existing page to new page. For WordPress site’s generally Linux based severs are used so  you would use your .htaccess file for URL redirection. .htaccess is the place where we can add our url redirection script.Thus search engines can understand the old url is replaced with another one so that will be the permanant place for that particular matter.Thus search engine will replace the old url and add the new url to it’s search index.Now there is no chances for search traffic loss.

How we can set up a permanent 301 url redirection via .htaccess on Apache server.

For this Open your .htacess file through your WordPress admin panel or download it from server by using filezilla client or some other file transferring software, then add the redirection code right before

The format is something like this

Redirect 301 /my-old-page.html http://www.mydomain.com/my-new-page.html

Replace the ” my-old-page.html ” with your site’s old URL which you want to redirect  and  replace the ” my-new-page.html” with your newly created page’s URL corresponds to your old URL.You can repeat this process manually until your important search indexed pages are redirected to its new URLs.

It is very easy to setting up a permanent 301 url redirect for a small number of url’s but when it comes for a site having thousand’s of pages and needs to url redirection .it is really time consuming . According to my knowledge there is not any kind of effective automatic solution for this process,usually, after the migration process almost all the old url structure surely will change to another form.the only solution is by doing this process manually.if you can’t do it then find some paid services.In such conditions there would have a common question ie

Is there a limit to how many 301 (permanent) redirects I can do on a site?

Google’s web spam team head Matt Cutts give a detailed explanation for this question watch his video.

May be because of slow internet connection some users cant watch the video properly .so i tried to explain the summary of Matt Cuts video.

He answered for this question ” Is there a limit to how many 301 (permanent) redirects I can do on a site? How about how many redirects i can chain together ? ” When you migrating from an old website to new website use 301 permanent url redirect,if the redirection is only for a particular period of time then use 302 page redirection or temporary redirect.Because 301 redirection is permanent there no go back or you can undo it.Now the answer for the question whether there is a limit for 301 redirect. The answer is there’s  no limit on the number of 301 redirect that we are willing to crawl with in a site.

But there is one limit you should know about that,Suppose you start on one page and you do a 301 redirect to another page then you do a 301 redirect to another page  and again another page so on,at what point does googlebot sort of stop and get busy ,it means you can do redirect one hop that’s the ideal redirects,but googlebot will follow multiple hop or multiple levels of redirects but when the user make too many redirects like four or five then it’s get little bit dangerous because googlebot might decide not to follow all these redirects. So there is no limit per site’s on the number of 301 permanent redirect that Google will follow,however there is a limit in the sheer number of chain of redirect (Multiple hop) hop that Google willing to follow.So please Keep it down to one or two ,may be three that’s much better otherwise it will became more dangerous.

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