Moving pages without vanishing: the 301 redirect
Every page that changes address without a redirect loses everything it had built up: its links, its ranking, its regulars. The permanent redirect passes on the inheritance, and Google documents precisely how.
A web page that moves without leaving a forwarding address dies twice: for the visitors who had kept the link, and for Google, which had taken months to make room for it. The redirect is the web’s change-of-address notice, and it is one of the best documented mechanisms in all of SEO.
What a redirect passes on
Google distinguishes permanent redirects, which say “the page now lives here, for good”, from temporary redirects, which say “go this way for the time being”. The difference is not cosmetic: faced with a permanent redirect, Google transfers to the new address what the old one had accumulated, the indexing, the signals, the value of the links received, then replaces the old URL with the new one in its results. A temporary redirect, on the other hand, leaves the old address in place in the index: it is the wrong choice for a definitive move, and yet it is often what you get by default.
The three occasions where everything is at stake
The URL touch-up, first: renaming /prestations.html to /services/ looks harmless, it is a full-scale move. The switch to HTTPS, next, which the previous article named as the first trap. The redesign, finally, where dozens of pages change address at once: it deserves its own article, where the migration is treated in full.
In all three cases the rule is the same: redirect page to page. The old pricing page to the new pricing page, not to the home page. The mass redirect to the home page is the classic lazy reflex; for the visitor who was looking for a price, landing on the home page is as good as a locked door, and Google largely treats those redirects as vanished pages.
How to check on your own site
No tooling needed: take three old addresses from your site, the ones from before the last redesign, an old quote or an email archive always contains some, and paste them into the browser. Each one should arrive, without detour or error message, at the page that took over the role. A chain of redirects, A to B to C, works but wastes: Google recommends redirecting straight to the final destination, and every extra hop adds a delay the visitor pays for.
One last point of discipline: a permanent redirect is a promise. You do not remove it after six months because “nobody clicks any more”; the links placed on other sites will never update themselves, and they are precisely what the redirect preserves.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.