Is a page moving to a different web address, or are you replacing an old website with a new one? With a redirect you automatically send visitors and Google from the old address to the new one. That way nobody ends up on a dead-end 'page not found' (404).
Why does this matter?
Especially with a new website this is indispensable: the old addresses are often still in Google, in newsletters or on other sites. Without a redirect they return a 404 error — bad for visitors and for your position in Google. With a redirect all those old links keep working and you keep your place in the search results.
When do you use it?
- You replace an old website with a new one
- You rename or move a page
- You want a short, easy link to forward to a longer page
Why redirects protect your SEO
Migrating a whole site to a new structure is a classic case: hundreds of old URLs need to point somewhere before you switch over, not after visitors start hitting 404s. Redirects set up in advance keep that transition invisible to the outside world.
Redirects work closely together with your SEO: search engines pass on most of a page's ranking value through a redirect, so a well-planned set of redirects protects the position you have already built up.
If you are moving from a manually built page to one generated through dynamic pages, a redirect is what bridges the old URL pattern to the new one, so nothing existing breaks in the process.
Practical tip: keep a simple list of every URL you retire, even ones with little traffic. It takes a minute to redirect now and saves cleanup later, once the source of an old link is long forgotten.
Types of redirects and when to use each
Not every redirect should behave the same way. A permanent move — a page renamed for good — should use a permanent redirect, so search engines transfer ranking value to the new address and eventually stop indexing the old one. A temporary change, such as briefly pointing a page elsewhere during a promotion, should stay temporary, or search engines may treat the change as permanent when you didn't mean it to be.
Chains of redirects — an old page pointing to a page that itself redirects elsewhere — are worth avoiding where possible. Each extra hop adds a small delay for visitors and makes the eventual destination harder to trace when something needs fixing later. Point directly to the final address whenever you can.
Redirects across different kinds of site changes
A rebrand that changes a domain name needs redirects for literally every existing page, mapped one-to-one to its equivalent on the new domain — skipping even a handful of low-traffic pages can quietly cost more ranking value than expected. A smaller restructuring, like consolidating two overlapping pages into one, needs just a couple of targeted redirects pointing both old addresses at the surviving page.
Retiring an old product or event, once it is no longer relevant, is often better handled with a redirect to a related current item — a discontinued product to its closest replacement, an old event to next year's — rather than a dead end.
Common mistakes that undo the benefit
The most common mistake is setting up a redirect and forgetting to update the internal links that still point to the old address. Every internal link that has to bounce through a redirect is a small, avoidable delay — once a redirect is in place, take a moment to update the source links themselves too.
The second is redirecting many different old pages to a single generic page, such as the homepage, instead of their closest actual equivalent. Search engines and visitors both notice when a specific old link lands somewhere unrelated, and it wastes most of the ranking value the redirect was meant to preserve.
For how a page's title and description carry over — or don't — through a redirect, see SEO titles and SEO and structured data for the fuller technical picture.
How to ask the assistant
Redirect /old-page/ to /new-page/.