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Updated 2 months ago

Maintaining Seo-friendly Slug Structure During Site Rebuild

At a glance

I'm currently rebuilding a site with Relume from scratch. Everything is pretty neat so far but there is one thing I'm not sure how to resolve. I have a solution but I'm interested if there's any better one.

So the original site made without client first and it's CMS is not well thought through. The startup can't allow to mess up SEO right now so I have to keep all the slugs.

The original slug structure is directly nested under the domain. So the site is www.example.com/pagename. But in the new site I'd prefer to generate new pages from CMS but that's only possible with this slug structure: www.example.com/page/pagename

I can obviously create new pages manually and attach their links under the CMS nav elements. But that's slightly less convenient. Is there a better solution?

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5 comments

, Already got the same issue...
I solved it with 301 redirect from www.example.com/pagename to www.example.com/page/pagename

For my clients, I made a redirect wild card on my server.

If you find a better way, would love to hear it

Thanks I thought about 301. My client concerned about messing up the seo with it. Is it safe? What's your experience?

Based on Google documentation, this is one typical case where 301 makes sense.
For SEO, the 301 is generally safe and the recommended method.

However, migrating a website will impact your SEO anyway. The best you can do is to set the right expectations and highlight the long-term benefits of the new website.

Personally, I do the 301. Once your server is set, you don't have to worry much anymore

agree with all of the above - want to highlight what Sofian is saying about setting the right expectations - just keeping the CMS the same but rewriting all of the content across the rest of the website, will have an effect on SEO. Even changing its layout could have an effect on SEO. So I think you'll want to be sure to let the client know that a dip or dropoff in SEO should always be expected when redesigning a website and that it will pay off in the future to have the right structures out of the gate.

Thanks Matt, The new site is done by the book, so it will be a huge change structurally by it's class names etc. I'm even putting it together in a new Webflow project and transfer the site plan to this. Maybe the 301 links will be the closest thing to the previous site. 😄

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