It’s the process of driving your visitors and search engines to a specific URL rather than the URL they originally requested. Redirection plays an important role when content has been moved, but it is also required when the content resides on a different system than your Sitefinity instance. 

If you’re launching on a new domain, or changing the information architecture of your site, e.g., deleting pages or moving content, you must ensure that your visitors don’t end up getting a page not found error for relevant content that was previously available. In addition, search engines need to understand that content has been moved. The right content and domain redirects management will help in retaining your customer base, user experience, SEO, and website visibility, during and after the launch of a new website, ensuring business continuity. 

Wildcard redirects 

There are moments when restructuring URLs on your website is unavoidable. This could be due to a rebranding that involved a new domain name, a new CMS that uses a different URL structure, or redirecting traffic to new and updated content. 

Wildcard redirect is an option that allows users and search engines to get to the content of your website no matter what the new URL structure is. Wildcard redirects, sometimes referred to as “catch-all URLs”, allows catch and redirect requests for mistyped, non-existent, or even random subdomains to a valid page on your site. 

The wildcards definitions are easy to define, just by putting a ‘*’ from where the capture should stop.  

Handle redirects with the correct status code 

HTTP status codes are three-digit responses a server returns at the request of a client - a browser or a search engine and are vital to your SEO efforts. The Redirects Management Tool allows you to custom define the appropriate status code for each redirect defined, whether it is a (HTTP) 301 – moved permanently, or (HTTP) 307 - temporary redirection. You can also block some URL requests using 404 http error code for example. 

Query string handling 

Quite often the query string portion of the URL is something that you would like to keep, so your analytics measurements are possible to follow, regardless of whether the site is being relaunched, the marketing campaigns do not have to stop. When defining the redirect, you can decide should the query string be kept or should it be omitted. 

Bulk import/export of redirects  

The large organizations websites have hundreds of domains (keyword, markets, local or content), and thousands of URLs. When working on a digital transformation project usually a lot of the URLs change and for the content editors it is important that they can work with convenient tools – Excel is one of the preferred choices. You can export the redirect mapping into CSV file that can be opened in Excel or magnitude of tools that read CSV. You can also import already prepared URL tables from your spreadsheet where the editors have produced. 

Deployment scenarios  

The Redirects Management Tool supports deployment scenarios in on-prem, AWS, Azure and Sitefinity cloud. Depending on your project, corporate requirements, or licensing limitations, the deployment scenario can be updated to support all common cases.