Redirecting an Old Page Properly

What a retired page is carrying

A page that has existed for years has links pointing at it, a position in the index, and people arriving from bookmarks and old emails.

Removing it without a redirect discards all three at once.

Redirecting it moves most of that to wherever you point, provided the destination is a reasonable substitute.

Which makes the choice of destination the whole of this decision.

The rule for choosing

• The closest equivalent page.
• The parent category, if there is no equivalent.
• Not the home page, as a habit.
• Not a page about something else.
• Nothing, if there is genuinely no equivalent.

The third is where most of the loss happens. A redirect to the home page is treated as an admission that the content is gone, so it is frequently handled as though the page had simply been removed, and the accumulated value goes with it.

When to point at nothing

Which is a legitimate option people rarely take.

Where a page has no equivalent, redirecting it somewhere unrelated sends somebody to a page that does not answer what they came for.

A properly handled gone page, with a helpful message and routes to the main sections, serves that person better than an irrelevant redirect.

It also keeps your redirect list honest rather than accumulating hops to approximations.

The test is whether somebody arriving from the old link would find the destination useful.

If they would not, do not send them there.

A worked example

A business discontinued a service and removed the page, which had been their second most visited.

Nothing was redirected, so several years of links pointed at an error page and the traffic vanished.

Rather than restoring it, they wrote a page explaining what they offer instead and why the old service ended, and pointed the old address at that.

Traffic recovered to about two thirds of the original within a few months, and some of it converted into the replacement service.

The people arriving had wanted the old thing and were willing to consider what replaced it, which an error page had never allowed.

The whole fix was one page and one redirect.

Permanent, not temporary

A distinction that matters and is easy to get wrong.

A permanent redirect tells search engines the move is final and to transfer everything to the new address.

A temporary one says the original will return, so the old address is kept in the index and the value stays with it.

Most tools and plugins default to permanent, and some do not, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming.

Use temporary only when the page genuinely will come back, such as a seasonal page out of season.

Getting this wrong is invisible for months and then explains why nothing transferred.

Keep it indefinitely

Since redirects get removed during later work.

An old link on somebody else's site can send a visitor five years later, and the redirect is what makes that work.

Removing redirects during a rebuild is one of the most common ways a site loses accumulated value, and it happens because nobody has the list.

Keep a list of every redirect with the date and the reason, in the same place as your other site records.

Hand it to anybody who rebuilds the site, and check afterwards that the old addresses still resolve.

They cost nothing to keep and are expensive to recreate.

Fix the links you control

Which is the step everybody skips.

Your own pages, your menu, and your sitemap probably still point at the old address.

Those should be updated to point directly at the new page rather than relying on the redirect.

Leaving them creates unnecessary hops and, over several rounds of this, chains that slow everything and occasionally break.

Update your own links, then let the redirect handle only the links you cannot change.

A quick crawl of your own site finds these in minutes.

Check it worked

Since a redirect can be configured and not function.

Open the old address in a browser and confirm it lands on the intended page.

Check in your search console that the old address is being seen as redirected rather than as an error.

And watch the destination page's traffic over the following weeks, which should rise if the transfer is working.

Expect weeks rather than days for the index to reflect it.

And check it again after any hosting change or rebuild, since redirects live in server configuration or a plugin and both get replaced without anybody thinking about it.

Watch for the loop and the chain

Two failure modes that appear once a site has been through this a few times.

A chain happens when the old page points at a second page that was itself later redirected, so a visitor takes two or three hops to arrive.

A loop happens when two redirects point at each other, which produces a page that never loads at all and which nobody notices because neither address is linked from the site.

Both come from adding redirects one at a time without looking at the existing list, which is why keeping the list matters beyond record-keeping.

When adding a new one, check whether the destination is itself already redirected and point at the final address instead.

The counter-case

Not everything deserves a redirect.

A page that never had traffic, links, or a purpose can simply go, and redirecting it adds a rule for nothing.

Large numbers of redirects to approximate destinations also make a site harder to reason about later.

And a page removed because it was wrong or embarrassing should not be redirected to something that keeps its old address alive prominently.

Point it at the closest equivalent, permanently, update your own links, and keep the redirect list.

The procedure

1. Check what the page earned first.
2. Find the closest equivalent.
3. Point at nothing if there is none.
4. Make it permanent.
5. Update your own links.
6. Record it with a date.
7. Open the old address and confirm.

Step two decides how much survives, since a redirect to a close equivalent carries most of what the page had and one to the home page carries very little.

The site-wide version of this is covered in rebuilding without losing your rankings.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.