Aurora SEO: Manage URL redirects for Community pages

Over time, content on your community changes, moves, is deleted/archived, or replaced. When this happens, you want to make sure that the web searches don’t show results that go to obsolete or missing pages. Or, sometimes, you might want to point people to newer or more relevant content.

To help optimize these search results and make sure that people get to the right content, you can create redirect rules.

Redirects enable you to keep the page and link authority of your website when a website’s URL is redirected to another URL for any reason. 

Basically, redirects help you keep the SEO of your website healthy and keep visitors engaged on your site. Properly defined redirects help keep your search rankings. The most common types of redirects are 301 (permanent) redirect and 302 (temporary) redirect. 

Technically, there’s no behavioral difference between a permanent or temporary redirect. Permanent redirects are for the pages that you do not want to retain and might want to permanently delete. Temporary redirects are for the pages you plan to keep in place for a finite time period. For example, you might want to temporarily redirect to another page while you make updates to the source page on your site and then remove the rule when the update is complete. Defining the redirect as temporary (302), you can easily find these rules in the list when you want to remove them.

Admins and members with the Manage Redirect Rules permission can access Redirect rules in the SEO Settings page (Settings > System > SEO).

Key points

When creating redirect rules, you must:

• Use valid community URLs. You cannot redirect to an external site.
• Use different URLs. Currently, we don't support nested redirects. When creating redirect rules, keep the following in mind:
• You cannot use a destination URL in one rule as the source URL in another rule.
• You cannot use a source URL in one rule as the source URL in another rule.

If you experience these conflicts, you must delete one of the other rules in your list to create this new rule.

Tip: Avoid redirecting to posts marked as spam, archived content, or content in private boards and Groups. You should link only to public URLs.

Add redirect rule

1. Sign in to the community as an Admin.
2. Go to Settings > System > SEO.
3. Click Add Rule.
   
4. Enter the Source and Destination URLs. (URLs must be from one of your company’s community pages.)
5. Select Redirect Type: 301 (Permanent) or 302 (Temporary).
6. Click Add.
   

Note: It takes an hour for the redirects to reflect on the site.

Delete redirect rule

To delete an existing rule, click Delete next to the rule you want to remove.