Overview
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Page Redirects are a useful SEO tool. A 301 redirect tells web browsers and search engines that a particular web page has moved permanently and to show the new redirect target in search results. . Apart from making sure your site visitors get to the right page, Page Redirect is a useful SEO tool. |
For your Commerce Vision website, 301 redirects are especially relevant for pages that are no longer used, e.g., pages for old categories and products, misspelt categories and productsold or misspelt category and product pages, expired promotions and campaigns, etc. Or those with new URL names - perhaps the path names have been changed to make them more meaningful to the user.
Step-by-step guide
To configure a Page Redirect:
- In the CMS, go to Settings → SEO Maintenance (/zSearchEngineOptimisationMaintenance.aspx).
- Click the Page Redirects tab.
- Click New.
Populate the fields as per the table below:
Field Value Notes Incoming URL The old page URL from the first forward slash ('/') onward. Example:
www.commercevision.com.au/old-page would be entered as '/old-page'.Outgoing URL The new page URL from the first forward slash ('/') onward. Example:
www.commercevision.com.au/new-page would be entered as '/new-page'.Include URL Parameters Leave this box unticked to exclude parameters. URL parameters structure extra information for a URL such as specifying dynamic content, filtering, user or campaign tracking. Parameters start with a ‘?’ symbol after the URL. Multiple parameters are separated by the ‘&’ symbol.
Here is a simple one that specifies a product after the product display URL:
There are a few SEO considerations when it comes to URL parameters, largely because the use of parameters can lead to a high volume of pages with very similar content.
When included, the system will pass thru any parameters from the incoming URL and attach to the outgoing URL
If this is a parameterised URL, decide whether the parameters need to be included for the target. E.g., Parameters are sometimes generated dynamically when a user completes an action without’t actually changing the content on the page. This can lead to a few common SEO issues:
Duplicate content: if we have a lot of different URLs that are all just parameterized versions ofthe
samepage
, we don’t want search engine crawlers to view these as duplicate content, which is a problem since search engines like Google view it as low quality content.Wasted crawl budget: Duplicate content is also a problem froma crawl budget perspective. If
search engine crawlers are crawling many URLs that are all versions of the same page, they may not budget enough resources to crawl unique and valuable pages.- Dilution of page ranking signals: if other sites are linking to different versions of your URL due to parameter usage, the value of those backlinks is split across multiple versions of the same page. These pages could end up cannibalizing your primary page’s rankings.
Tracking issues: If you use a tracking tool like Google Analytics, many of the reports are based on exact URL. If you have a lot of different versions of the same page that use parameters, each of those will show up separately in your reports (unless you set up special configurations to address this).the target URL is the primary URL, you may not need to add parameters used in the incoming URL.
Response Code 301 (Moved Permanently) This tells search engines and crawlers that the page has moved permanently. Match Type Exact Match or Path Determines how to match the incoming URL
Path: only match path without the parameters (i.e. the section before the "?")
Exact Match: requires matching for the entire incoming URL including any parameters
- Click OK to save.
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To test the redirection, enter the outgoing URL in the brower Address Bar and check it redirects to the incoming URL. |
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