Three myths about redirects

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A few things about redirects that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

“It only matters for big sites”

A 301 passes ranking, a 302 does not. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

“Our platform handles it”

Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

How to tell if yours is fine

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about redirects before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.