Drupal 7 Warning
If you are migrating an existing website over to Drupal, one consideration is how you redirect the old Web page addresses (URLs) to the appropriate pages on the Drupal version of the site.
There are a couple of cases where you might need to do this:
- You cut a page from your old site, so it no longer exists on the new site.
- You changed the web address for a page when you created it on the new site.
"301 redirects" are considered the best way to handle redirected pages, because they tell search engines to update their databases with the new paths. This way, you won't lose your search engine pagerank or lose site visitors with 404 "not found" errors.
Here's how to set up a redirect for a page:
- Log in to your site and navigate to the page you want to set up a redirect for.
- Click the "Edit Current" tab.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on the "URL Redirects" link.
- Click the button that says, "Add URL Redirect to this Node."
- In the "From" field, type in the old URL for this page (the one that already exists on your old site). Important: You only want to type in the part of the URL that comes after gatech.edu/. For example, if the URL for this page on your old site was www.space.gatech.edu/planning/, then you only need to type "planning/" into the from field.
- Click the "Save" button. Note: Leave the "To" field the way it is. Do not modify it.
If, for some reason, you need to add another redirect that points to this same page, you can just repeat the process. This might be the case if you cut pages from your old site when migrating to the new site. Rather than risk having visitors get error messages when they try to visit a page that no longer exists, redirect the old page URL to a page on your new site, even if it's your homepage.