Maintain Your Search Engine Ranking When You Switch to SchoolFront
Management of 301 Redirects
When you create website pages in the CMS, the system automatically generates a friendly URL for the page based on its title—“/schoolfront-help.aspx,” for example, is the URL created for a page named “SchoolFront Help.” If you edit the name of the page later, the friendly URL will automatically be updated to match the edit. For example if you change the name to “SchoolFront Online Help,” its new URL will be automatically updated to “/schoolfrint-online-help.aspx.”
From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standpoint, it is not a good idea to change URLs frequently—if someone bookmarked an old URL or if the page is already popular in search engine results using the old URL (e.g. on Google or Bing), you do not want the link to be broken. You therefore need to have the old page do what is referred to as a “301 redirect” to the new URL. This “301” status code tells the web browser that the page moved permanently. The CMS will create 301 redirects for you automatically when you re-name a page or blog post in SchoolFront.
Use 301 Redirects to Maintain Search Engine Ranking After DNS Transfer
301 redirects are also beneficial if you begin using our CMS after using another solution to manage your website. If you have good search engine placement and page rank with your previous URLs it is desirable to not lose your placement in search engine results. You can use 301 redirect from the old, non-SchoolFront URL to the new URL in SchoolFront so that search engines know that the URL has changed permanently. This can help a lot for keeping and continuing to build your search engine ranking while transitioning to our CMS.
What to do?
If you want all of your old page URLs to redirect to new page URLs or if you have specific pages that were very popular in the past, contact SchoolFront Support for assistance configuring 301 redirects. Please include a list of the old URLs as well as how the old URLs should be mapped to your new URLs (if possible).