Redirects allow you to point a web page address (URL), or a group of similarly structured web pages, to another equivalent page, or set of pages.
Typically, this is used when you are migrating to REC from another website which has pages already indexed in Google. Setting up redirects allows people who click on the old URL still in Google to be redirected to the new equivalent page you have set up. This avoids visitors getting 404 errors; these errors are not penalised by Google from an SEO perspective.
For a new site it's worth making sure you redirect the popular pages if the URLs have changed, you can also monitor for 404s in Google Search Console.
For existing sites you can use Google Analytics to track 404s down as well, find out more here.
Setting Up A Single Page Redirect
1. Go To Redirect Manager
2. Enter the old page URL and the one to which you wish to redirect
e.g. services.html to solutions.html
3. Tick Permanent
4. Tick Handle URI if you are entering the entire URL in the field e.g. https://www.domain.com/services
4. Save
Note: Make sure you clear your cache before trying to click an old hyperlink, linking through to the new URL, otherwise you will still load the old page.
Advanced Users: Setting Up A Redirect For Groups Of Similar Pages
You can use regular expressions to maps groups of similar URL's to a new URL structure. This is especially useful for product pages.
You also have the option of using modifiers for this method as shown below.
The regex based cases can also use modifiers on the matched results, such as:
{$1|upper} -> Make the first replacement uppercase
{$1|upper} -> Make the first replacement lowercase
{$2|safe} -> Replaces the second match with a url safe version (based on the default REC url filtering with underscores for spaces)
1. Go To Redirect Manager
2. Enter the old URL format and the new URL format to which all pages matching that format will redirect using regular expressions
e.g. product\.php\?id=(\d+)&name=(.*) to {$2|safe}--product--$1.html
3. Tick Reg Ex
4. Leave Permanent unticked
5. Save
Tip: You can use this tool to test your regular expressions